Small molecules such as PLX5622 for microglia depletion and tamoxifen for inducible Cre recombination are commonly used in mouse research. Traditional application methods such as drug-infused chow, oral gavage or injections have limitations, including uncontrolled dosing (chow) or risk of injury and/or stress (gavage or injections). Here, to address these issues, we have...
Anesthesia is indispensable for minimizing stress during invasive procedures. However, anesthesia can induce undesired effects on the organism and its physiological homeostasis. In experiments involving animals, these consequences may reduce animal welfare and alter experimental outcomes. Moreover, most of the studies characterizing the effects of murine anesthetic protocols on...
The functional diversity of cells is driven by the different proteins they express. While improvements in protein labeling techniques have enabled the measurement of proteomes with increased sensitivity, measuring cell type-specific proteomes in vivo remains challenging. One of the most useful pipelines is bio-orthogonal noncanonical amino acid tagging (BONCAT) with the MetRS...
Meta-inflammation (chronic, low-grade systemic inflammation) is increasingly recognized as an essential link between obesity and the development of various noncommunicable diseases. However, large animal models for studying obesity-related meta-inflammation are lacking. Minipigs have great potential as models for human diseases, warranting investigation of the performance of the...
Monitoring the health of mice used in animal experiments constitutes an important instrument toward microbiological standardization, as infections can alter physiological parameters and immune reactions and may therefore have an essential impact on experimental outcome. In view of the high prevalence rates of murine astrovirus (MuAstV) infections in laboratory mouse facilities...
The ferret has been widely used to study both the pathogenicity and the transmissibility of respiratory viral infections, but little is known about how host-associated microbial communities alter disease susceptibility owing to the lack of a validated model. Here, we compared the safety of injectable versus oral broad-spectrum antibiotics and their efficacy in reducing culturable...
The reproducibility crisis in bioscience, characterized by inconsistent study results, impedes our understanding of biological processes. Global collaborative studies offer a unique solution to this problem. Here, we present a global collaboration using the zebrafish (Danio rerio) novel tank test, a popular behavioral assay for anxiety-like responses. We analyzed data from 20...
Nonhuman primates have a key role in the evaluation of novel therapeutics including vaccine and drug development. Monitoring biochemical and hematological parameters of macaques is critical to understand toxicity and safety, but general reference intervals following standardized guidelines remain to be determined. Here we compiled multiple internal datasets to define normal...