Lab mice have a chill, and that may be messing up study results (2016)
statnews.com
statnews.com
There was a large room for housing rats for all of the labs in the building - mostly Sprague Dawley, which are very well studied at this point and chosen because they're easy to care for. The room was nowhere near 20 - 26C. It felt like walking into a fridge.
I think there are more problems than just the temperature that rats are kept at.
There are requirements for minimum standards of housing for animals - every university that does animal experimentation is required to have a LAR (lab animal resources) officer who verifies compliance. But researchers have to be frugal with money (even grad students are expected to live on a 20-30k research stipend), so they really do the bare minimum. Cages are as small as they can be, and rats are housed in pairs so that they can socialize, but their cages are almost barren. They're required to have some form of environmental enrichment, which means a little wooden rod in every cage that they can play with and chew.
It's frustrating to think that there are probably many studies that have been impacted by not studying "normal" rats. We're studying specific research breeds of stressed rats who're trapped in little boxes for their whole lives. It'd be like if you studied humans who've been trapped in their apartments for the last 4 months and assumed normal psychology and physiology.
The implications are quite alarming for existing testing and they talk about how he was basically ignored and the mice quietly fixed.
Weinstein talks about how they are different and why it matters and how significant it is.
Articles like this just talk about how it changes results. Mice aren't people. Cold mice are not hot mice. Stressed mice are not chilled mice. We need to be aware of this and this is a good article and it talks on how to action it, but Weinstein is making a case (right or wrong) for something different and more significant.
As to the whole "studying stressed out rodents might not give representative results" point, I'm reminded of the Rat Park experiment [0].
---
The description you've provided--especially that line--is eerily reminiscent of the "Enrichment Center" from Portal.[0] As that game (humorously) demonstrates, it's unreasonable to expect that the physiology of an animal wouldn't change under those conditions. How much research would've resulted in different outcomes had the animals involved been kept under different conditions?
So they added a heart to the texture and a few voice lines, and not only was that problem solved but they created one of the most memorable moments in the game by making people care about a cube and then having them get rid of it.
"While it has been a faithful companion, your Companion Cube cannot accompany you through the rest of the test. If it could talk - and the Enrichment Center takes this opportunity to remind you that it cannot - it would tell you to go on without it because it would rather die in a fire than become a burden to you."
I can't see any good alternatives, and I know this is important to advance human medicine, but I can't help but feel it.
Yeah, it never sat particularly well with me. We and other labs studied neurodegenerative diseases, so we studied a model form of those diseases by inducing it in rats. The Parkinson's lab adjacent to us gave their rats a drug that destroyed their dopaminergic neurons, we inhibited thiamine to cause severe memory impairment. Really horrible things, but I'm not sure that there's a good alternative if we want to study diseases so we can prevent or cure them in humans.
But there are others too - gut microbiome and other microbiomes/viromes change from facility to facility and this is a huge deal for pretty much every topic except hardcore neuroscience. Probably. Who knew the bugs inside us are a big deal for everything that happens in us!
All of this notwithstanding the growing knowledge that no, you can't just give mice cancer/MS/autism and check if a drug works there, expecting the same result in humans. I'll chalk the majority of problems in our drug pipelines to this fallacy.
...to state the obvious, scientists aren't giving drugs to mice and then shipping them off to pharmacies. They're testing the drugs in mice first to see if it's worth testing in humans. Then, the human trials are used to determine efficacy.
It's not a perfect system to be sure, but what is the alternative? Bypass animal testing and go straight to human trials? I'd have a lot of obvious ethical issues with that.
The other approach is to start testing in humans at a very, very low dose. While this would work it would require a change in the regulatory environment.
Are you going to be happy with a researcher coming to your home and breaking your dog's back? Or injecting it with toxins to induce neuropathy?
There is even a class of them called psychobiotics.
In a lot of unis I've been in, the buildings are kinda centrally managed. Steam pipes serving multiple buildings that are often not even enabled during the summer. And in one case, the central management system for that stuff was running on a DOS PC from a vendor who went bankrupt and had no forseeable replacement. Fortunately I'm not around to experience what happens when that box finally can't be repaired.
The not publishing research was interesting in that holding research in-house, making predictions, getting grants to research those predictions and then using the original unpublished discovery as the basis for the whole lot makes a lot more money.
Yes, the perverse incentives of the market play havoc with the spirit of the process of science. Which seems to be the source of the brain drain, in as much as talent leaves the university for the market instead of staying and teaching more talent.
Another problem is that even if the results are published, usually it takes a long time for information to diffuse into the wider community. I assume this is largely because finding a novel ideas is like searching for a needle in the haystack of common knowledge that has been spread far and wide.
As long as the temperature is kept consistently cooler for both the experimental and control groups (and whatever other groups), it shouldn't matter, right? Seems to me the problem is the variation and the fact that it's not controlled.
My only point was, the article was framing this as an issue of scientist comfort, ie human researchers don't want to work in hot labs. I don't see why they should have to, at least in most cases.
followed by "temperature dependency of [gene2product] regulation of [gene1]"
absolute temperature of culture can confound you into negative results so you will never see the genes activity until the experiment is replicated with culturally disparate subjects. thats just being simple as well, there is normally a continuum of influences and its up to experiment to tease out the largest contributor[s] to the effect of interest
Regardless of the temperature the mice prefer, obviously it would be a good idea to record the temperature the experiment was conducted at.
I would guess that the interiors of walls and attic spaces are a good bit warmer than the open portion of a room where we live.
The rooms around it.
[1]
It was perhaps 22C at my home yesterday, and by chance I had to get something from the loft - I'd be surprised if it wasn't 30C.
Mine probably isn't because the insulation is on the 'floor' of the attic, so it should be approximately the same temperature as the outside air (well, if it were ventilated properly). This is one of the design choices of an attic. Still, I do wonder if this provides enough hot spaces for mice to have evolved to expect a 30 degrees environment. Maybe they do in some places.
Hmm, mine too.
> Still, I do wonder if this provides enough hot spaces for mice to have evolved to expect a 30 degrees environment
Yeah, this does seem quite questionable to me too, at least for temperate countries.
I didn't see an explanation of why this recommendation is below the "comfortable temperature" of mice. Is there a specific reason this temperature is recommended?
Anyway, here is my guess for the two questions:
1) The recommended temperature in the lab is based on other factors than the mice's prefered temperature. E.g. comfort of the scientists and technicians, spread of bacteria etc.
2) The temperature prefered by mice was determined by studying them in the wild or in the lab. E.g., if given the choice between two places of different temperature, which do they pick?
There are a few of such variables which it's not clear are taken into account or not, and probably more are unknown.
The article is from 2016 in any case
Our lab studies E. coli, and mice require pre-treatment to permit intestinal colonization by E. coli. However, about 2 in 5 mice are colonized without antibiotic pre-treatment. I wonder if these are the the colder and more stressed out mice (outside the cuddle puddle).
I'm not an expert on mice but that doesn't sound like a good thing.