When laboratory mice moved to the countryside where they could burrow in dirt, forage for food, and generally live like ordinary mice, they became more susceptible to infection with parasitic whipworms than mice that stayed in the lab, a new study has found.
When laboratory mice moved to the countryside where they could burrow in dirt, forage for food, and generally live like ordinary mice, they became more susceptible to infection with parasitic whipworms than mice that stayed in the lab, a new study has found.
The longer the mice lived outdoors, the greater the number and size of these intestinal worms — which are relatives of the human whipworms that infect over 450 million people worldwide, researchers from Princeton University and New York University School of Medicine found. The study was published March 8 in the journal PLoS Biology.
“The study gets at the question of how much we are really learning from highly controlled experiments conducted in artificial environments,” said Andrea Graham, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, who led the study. Such experiments are often used as precursors to studying diseases in humans.
In the study, outdoor mice also experienced a decrease in the type of immune response needed for expelling the worms, the researchers found. The mice’s guts contained a greater diversity of bacteria, including some that may have increased worm-egg hatching and prolonged the duration of infection.
Read more at Princeton University
Image: Researchers brought laboratory mice to a new home in a rural setting to study how their immune systems respond to infection with parasitic worms. They found that the outdoor mice had a decreased ability to combat worm infections compared to mice that stayed in the lab, suggesting the importance of environment on experimental results. (Credit: Andrea Graham, Princeton University)
