News & Comment

Host genetics, housing conditions, and antibiotic treatments impact microbiota diversity and composition, but microbes that inhabit the mouse gut and skin can also influence severity and penetrance of host mutant phenotypes.

There are administrative challenges inherent to any animal research program – from hiring vets and care staff to approving and overseeing protocols to reporting to the relevant authorities. Small institutions, with limited resources and available staff compared to ‘research juggernauts,’ can have extra hurdles to cross when administering their animal research programs.

The relationships between individuals and the research animals they work with can enhance animal welfare, but they also involve a moral cost to staff. Securing a safe space to communicate openly about animal welfare & research and acknowledge its emotional impacts is crucial. In this Comment, we reflect on emotional resilience and provide resources available to help manage the emotional burden of working with laboratory animals.

Robyn Raban and Omar Akbari describe a day in the life of the mosquito insectary team at the University of California, San Diego, outlining the procedures, goals, and types of systems they are engineering to control mosquito-transmitted diseases.

There’s growing evidence that sex-based differences can influence phenotypes beyond those directly related to the reproductive system; to fully understand a gene’s function, researchers should consider both male and female subjects.

Recombinase-expressing mice are selected based on where and when they will activate conditional alleles, but some produce phenotypes in isolation that can complicate analysis of those alleles.

Differential gene expression based on the parental origin can have a big impact on phenotype

Strain contributions arising from the strain of origin and backcrosses can modify phenotypic severity and/or penetrance of mutant alleles in mouse models.

Rehabilitation of tumor-afflicted sea turtles, and their utilization as a natural model for human and wildlife cancers.

Far from the Indopacific, aquatics manager Josh Barber and veterinarian Rebecca Ober walk through the recently established dwarf cuttlefish program at Columbia University and share their lessons learned for others interested in these intriguing animals.

Creating a null mutation of a gene is a powerful way to examine gene function, but knocking out part of a gene does not always result in a null allele.

A ‘day in the life’ of Dr. Jeanna Wheeler, a research scientist at the Seattle Institute for Biomedical & Clinical Research in Seattle, Washington. She works in the lab of Dr. Brian Kraemer, studying models of neurodegenerative diseases in worms and mice. Her most recent work can be found at https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aao6545.