• Question: why do you experiment on micess instead of any other animals/bugs

    Asked by FREDDIEFM to Sara, Richard on 18 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      HI Freddie,

      In large part its because mice are convenient – they’re small (so you can house them in a smaller place), breed well (so you can get enough) and they are more similar to people than, say, fish, insects or bacteria. Sometimes we might use something else. We sometimes use rats, especially if we need to take blood from them as part of our experiments, as they are bigger and you can take blood regularly without hurting them. We also have a series of experiments in sheep. We don’t house the sheep here (they’re in Australia, somewhere) but sheep were chosen as a model for that project because the sheep brain is more similar to ours in terms of size/layout and they wanted a model where they could also test new surgical techniques.

    • Photo: Sara Falcone

      Sara Falcone answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      Hello 🙂

      People experiments on various things: from yeast to fish (Zebra fish), to primates and also on humans when they do clinical trial. It really depends on what you work on and what is you aim.
      In my case, I study genetic diseases related focusing on those related with ageing. We use mice because they are small (our animal house is a nice large building but we have 50,000 mice!!!!), our DNA is very similar to their DNA (and we know what the differences are as well) and especially because they age relatively quickly: a mouse will be old around 15-18 months so we can screen them for almost two years to get a good idea of how they age.

      PS: you can take blood samples without causing harm in mice as well 😉

Comments