Today, we have an excellent example of why we should keep calm and carry on when it comes to mouse studies. At SFARI, a website for an autism research organization, Emily Singer writes that research groups cannot reproduce the reported “social deficit” behaviors in a mouse strain that’s intended to model autism in humans: A 2008 study from Nils Brose’s lab at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany, first suggested that mice lacking NLGN4 have a number of autism-like social deficits. The lab published similar findings from the mice in a paper in November. But in September, two independent groups reported that the same strain of mice, bred from animals furnished by the Brose lab, do not show any social deficits.
Click here to read more.
31
