10 ms·
Lab mice have a chill, and that may be messing up study results (2016)
- pvaldes 6y agoThe idea is intriguing but lab mice have also plenty of food and in warm blooded animals this, and the proximity of other mice, should provide the extra heat. The article is from 2016 in any case
- seesawtron 6y agoThat's a good point that this is not a new phenomenon. I am aware of some labs that do keep mice at warm temperatures already so maybe the scientific community already managed to make changes in some places.
- pazimzadeh 6y agoI can confirm that lab mice in our mouse house are alway huddled up together. 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).
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago> I can confirm that lab mice in our mouse house are alway huddled up together. I'm not an expert on mice but that doesn't sound like a good thing.
- pazimzadeh 6y agoWhy not? You don't think mice huddle in the wild?
- jmaygarden 6y agoThis doesn’t even get into how they’ve been bread to favor early survival versus longevity. Lab mice have abnormally long telomeres.
- bz33t 6y agoAccording to Bret Weinstein who figured out the connection between telomere length and breeding, they seem to have quietly changed the breeding protocols to bring the telomere length back down to be in line with wild type mice. He talks about it in a long interview that gets really interesting about a hour in: https://youtu.be/JLb5hZLw44s?t=4083 https://youtu.be/JLb5hZLw44s?t=4083
- meremortals 6y ago+1 Summary: https://podcastnotes.org/portal-with-eric-weinstein/bret-eric-weinstein-portal-lab-mice-telomeres/ https://podcastnotes.org/portal-with-eric-weinstein/bret-eri...
- kobieyc 6y agoThe real question is why is this not the headline news
- kleer001 6y agoThe hand waving answer is The DISC or the distributed idea suppression complex.
- dwd 6y agoI think that is Eric's facetious term for what Universities are (a play on the military/industrial complex) but the main problem he points to is the inventivisation through market forces to not release non-monitisable research and that the best researchers don't teach because they are more value to the University generating grant money and basically being salespeople. 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.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> a variety of factors, including researchers’ and technicians’ comfort at those temperatures, have prevented anyone from changing the thermostat. 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.
- ralusek 6y agoJust because it's consistent doesn't mean it's not impacting the outcomes in an important way.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoBut a warmer temperature could also be impacting outcomes, right? It seems to me that the temperature just needs to be both controlled and documented.
- nwienert 6y agoIt would at least need to be tested at both, you can’t guarantee the cooler temp isn’t doing anything.
- jldugger 6y ago> “It is not easy for an investigator to go and say, ‘I want the room warmer,’” O’Hara said. “They can, but it will probably take multiple efforts, multiple times, and more often than not they will give up.” 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.
- jameslk 6y ago> The National Academy of Sciences recommends housing mice between 20 and 26 degrees Celsius — about 68 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit. But the natural comfortable temperature for mice is warmer — between 30 and 32 degrees Celsius (86 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit). 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?
- _red 6y agoI dont have an answer, but could be for same reasons why hospitals keep it on the cooler side: Less fungal / bacteria growth. Less mites, insects, bugs, etc.
- pmiller2 6y agoThe GP comment is asking how 30-32 C was determined to be the most comfortable temperature for mice, not why we keep them cooler than the mice like.
- FrojoS 6y agoThat's not how I read it. 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?
- godelski 6y agoI've seen this come up several times and this article is 4 years old. Does anyone know if anything has changed since then?
- jmcgough 6y agoI worked in a Neuroscience lab as an undergrad research assistant for several years. My first year in particular involved a lot of cell counting and rat care. 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.
- jt94mf90d 6y agoSome of us have been boxed up for 4 months, and we have been fine.
- bugzz 6y agoSure, and some of the rats are probably fine too. But it still skews studies...
- pmiller2 6y agoAnd, some of us are starting to reach our limits due to being boxed up for 4 months. When you study a population, you want to be able to study representative samples of said population. Global conditions for humans are not even close to representative right now. Given the known effects of confinement stress on humans, getting representative population samples for most sorts of studies seems difficult, at best.
- ramraj07 6y agoWe have first hand experienced this - we couldnt induce disease in the same mice when our lab moved universities and we all knew the temperature was one of the biggest culprits. 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.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> 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. ...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.
- ramraj07 6y agoI'd argue that minimally positive results in these experiments should not be taken as any indication that the same therapy will work in humans unless they can convince an _extremely_ skeptical and thorough committee of experts that this result is likely translatable. That would immediately disqualify all xenograft models, and probably most native tumor models as well. So what should we do then? If I have solved it I would be running a successful company selling that secret sauce. But if I were to bet money then I'd say the best approach would be to come up with well thought out in vitro (and some mouse model) experiments that will clearly test all the known ways this drug will interact with every system in the human body; especially the immune system if it's a monoclonal. The emphasis should be on complete declaration of bankruptcy on any hope of a model system showing therapeutic efficacy that's correlated with expected human efficacy.
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- james_pm 6y agoObvious question: If the ambient temperature affects the outcome of the treatment for mice, then is that also the case for humans?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- strogonoff 6y agoLab lighting can also skew the outcomes. Rats exposed to constant white light, for example, have elevated baseline corticosterone concentrations in plasma (Scheving & Pauly, 1966). There are a few of such variables which it's not clear are taken into account or not, and probably more are unknown.
- ajb 6y agoI'm missing something here. What kind of mice have an environment of 30-32 degrees C in the wild? House mice live at the same temperature as people - they might be able to be warmer in their nest, but presumably so can lab mice, without making the room warmer. Are lab mice sourced from some species that is from a hot country? Regardless of the temperature the mice prefer, obviously it would be a good idea to record the temperature the experiment was conducted at.
- munificent 6y ago> House mice live at the same temperature as people 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.
- ajb 6y agoWalls may be better insulated, but to accumulate a high temperature you need a source of heat. Where is the source of heat in a wall? For attics you might be on to something as heat rises. Still, 30 degrees seems a lot to me.
- zxwx 6y agoThe sun is the heat source.
- NeutronStar 6y agoIt's 30 degrees outside all the time. Do you expect every house ever built to have been using AC?
- crooked-v 6y ago> Where is the source of heat in a wall? The rooms around it.
- ajb 6y agoThe claim is that the walls can be hotter than the room around it. By the second law of thermodynamics, heat doesn't naturally move from a cooler object to a hotter object, or as Flanders and Swann would put it, "heat don't move from a cooler to a hotter" (https://youtu.be/VnbiVw_1FNs?t=127 https://youtu.be/VnbiVw_1FNs?t=127) [1]
- failuser 6y agoAre stressed out mice a better model for humans or a worse one?