A Popular Sweetener Was Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice - eviltoast
  • Orbituary@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Not to mention that the gene pool of these lab mice is super small. Source: my brother is a PhD biochemist and lectured me often on this shit when I said, “hey, look at this study!”

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      The small gene pool is done on purpose. The mice are supposed to be as close to clones as possible so that you can have control populations and be confident that the results weren’t affected by certain genes and mutations in the test population.

      The size of the gene pool isn’t really an issue though because they can be bred however it’s required for tests. They have quite a lot of control over the genetics of those lab mice.

      Testing for a cure for diabetes? They can produce mice that are almost guaranteed to develop diabetes that you can then try to cure.

    • Bohurt@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Such a small groups are fine for initial investigation, they have enough of a size to be acceptable statistically for most of the performed studies. I don’t think they’d get approval from ethical committee overseeing animal experiments without initial study like this to conduct something on very high groups.