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| A laboratory mouse. CREDIT: Vasiliy Koval / Shutterstock |
New York University Hospital has reportedly lost thousands of laboratory
mice to Hurricane Sandy, a research setback that could take years to correct,
according to scientists.
The New York Daily News, citing an unnamed source, reported that thousands of mice perished when the storm flooded the hospital's Smilow
building. Power failure in the building also took out freezers and
refrigerators, likely destroying other biological research materials, the
source reported.
NYU phone systems remained down on
Wednesday (Oct. 31) with nonessential staff ordered to stay home, and
LiveScience was unable to confirm the number of mouse deaths. However, if the
reports are true, outside scientists say the consequences for medical research
could be far-reaching. "It's really, really devastating," said Jacco
van Rheenen, a medical physicist at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands
who has worked with laboratory mice. The problem may go beyond NYU, van Rheenan
told LiveScience. "Some mice are unique, they're just made for certain
research," he said. "So if [the researchers] didn't send it out to
other labs, that line is just lost."
Making a lab mouse
Mice can breed several times a
year, and they reach maturity quickly. But that doesn't mean that it's easy to
keep a colony of lab mice going. Scientists use genetic engineering techniques
to create and breed what are called transgenic mice — strains where certain
genes are "knocked out" or otherwise altered so researchers can
pinpoint genetic variables in development and disease.
Creating these transgenic lines
can take years. It starts with lab work to target a specific gene, said Ashley
Seifert, who researches tissue regeneration at the University of Florida in
Gainesville. Next, researches have to insert the altered genes into mice
blastocysts (early embryos) and then implant those embryos into mother mice
that can gestate the new strain. Then the researchers have to make sure the
genetic alterations made it through development and into the sperm and egg of
the baby mice so that they can breed and pass on these changes.
Simply knocking out one gene so
that it doesn't function in the body takes about a year, Seifert told
LiveScience. Many transgenic mice are more complex than that, however, and
additional genetic alterations require crossbreeding or manipulating multiple
genes. That can take two or three years.
How to rebuild
It's the kind of time a doctoral
student might not have, Seifert said. A Ph.D. student working for three years
to create a transgenic mouse strain for her research could find herself back to
square one in what's supposed to be a five- or six-year program. "If I
were to lose all my mice in one fell swoop, I'm basically starting from scratch
and have lost three years of work," Seifert said. It's the equivalent of
the only copy of a typewritten novel burning in a house fire, he added.
Not to mention three years of
funding. Research money is hard to come by, and grants are competitive, said
Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Duke University. And in an academic climate
of "publish or perish," early-career researchers who suffer a setback
can be in trouble. "Graduate students and postdocs, their careers depend
on publishing successful scientific research, and if they lose their animals
that's going to set them back," Jarvis told LiveScience. "I'm making
it sound dire here, but it probably is."
Once the power is on and the
damage catalogued, NYU researchers will have to rebuild, scientists said. If
researchers have shared their mouse strains with other scientists, they'll be
able to call their colleagues and ask for replacements, Jarvis said — a type of
scientific sharing that may save some researchers in the wake of this disaster.
"If somebody sent me something from NYU and they called me up, I would
say, 'I'll breed you more animals,'" Jarvis said.
But some strains may be unique to
NYU, either because their creators chose not to share them or because they're
too new. Those researchers will have no choice but to scrape that line of work
or start all over again. Graduate students will likely require extensions of
deadlines to complete their work. "One thing I would not do is, I wouldn't
give up," Jarvis said.
Source: Live Science
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