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Neuroscience laboratories can take steps to ‘go green’ in a number of ways, including curbing unnecessary energy usage and reducing plastic waste. Such measures often rely on behavioural changes but need not affect scientific output.
In a rat model of spinal cord injury, inhibiting calmodulin-mediated relocalization of aquaporin 4 to the blood–spinal cord barrier after injury reduced CNS oedema and promoted functional recovery.
Historically, preclinical pain research has been dominated by studies in male subjects. Jeffrey Mogil describes recent trends towards the inclusion of male and female subjects in research and the subsequent identification of qualitative sex differences in the mechanisms of pain processing.
There have been a number of recent advances in the use of transplanted cells to enable functional recovery in animal models of spinal cord injury. Fischer and colleagues review this work and describe the use of neural progenitor cell transplants to restore connectivity in key neural systems following spinal damage.
In this Perspective, Hanno Würbel and colleagues argue that a disregard for incorporating biological variation in study design is an important cause of poor reproducibility in animal research. They put the case for the use of systematic heterogenization of study samples and conditions in studies to improve reproducibility.
