Using doses of the chemical BPA similar to what humans encounter, the study shows that exposure to the chemical in pregnant mice can affect the sociability of their children and their children's children.
The loss of a single gene in mice can affect social behavior and impair their brains' ability to filter out distractions--both characteristics of several neurological diseases in humans.
This is the first time scientists have shown that pain in one colony of mice can affect an entirely separate colony, even when they are out of sight, says Loren Martin, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Second, the immune deficiency of each mouse strain (i.e. nude versus NOD/SCID mice) can affect the frequency of metastasis and must be taken into account when comparing experimental observations in xenografts (Pearson and Pouliot, 2012).
Supporting our hypothesis, it has previously been reported in literature that a disturbed assembly of the type II collagen fibrils in the cartilage matrix of growing mice can affect bone development, leading to increased bone resorption and alterations in the tissue properties [16].
Maternal diet in mice can affect offspring phenotype by increasing methylation rates (Wolff et al. 1998; Cooney et al. 2002; Waterland and Jirtle 2003, 2004; Cropley et al. 2006; Waterland et al. 2006; Lillycrop et al. 2007) or modifying histones (Lillycrop et al. 2007; Sandovici et al. 2011).
