mouse models of menopause / reproductive aging in social insects - brief notes


 

 

Another in a great series of webinars by NUS Medicine.

5:10 Start of 1st presentation - Berenice A. Benayoun - Why we need age-relevant mouse models of menopause

Ovariectomized mice are not good models of menopause. 

10:43 Slide - comparison of post-reproductive lifespan among mammalian species

18:46 VCD injection; VCD is 4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide, an environmental toxicant that causes ovarian failure

20:31 Genetic models - Foxl2 +/- ; Fshr +/-

25:00 Start of 2nd presentation - Ingrid Fetter Pruneda - The molecular and cellular basis of high fertility in social insects

Queen ants manage to have extremely high fertility at the same time as longer lifespan relative to worker ants.

35:20 ant reproductive mode can be flexible; some species have cyclic castes - switching from queen to worker and back

51:54 Apart from sex organs,  liver is most sexually dimorphic organ - important implications for drug metabolism

{ Does this have implications for liver transplantation? }


Comments

  1. BeatricheyMarch 16, 2021 at 1:15 AM

    WOW.. extremely interesting.. need to read... still overwhelmed with family...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. RhyothemisMarch 16, 2021 at 8:42 AM

      Hi, hope you are all okay. I've had a hard time keeping up with chores (haven't been keeping up, really - the house is a wreck). I still read and watch a lot because it helps me cope (that's my excuse, anyway). At least I can watch videos while washing dishes. In May we will get access to the vaccine, they say - & with luck we will finally get the dishwasher fixed a few weeks after getting vaccinated.

      Delete
  2. BeatricheyMay 31, 2021 at 12:38 AM

    Well.. I actually got rid of dishwasher after I found a black mold in its pipes...
    I have no energy to keep up with my elderly parents health.. and my mice but I am reading your posts always.. :)

    So, I decided to write a grant to explore the therapeutic effect of hallucinogens on Alzheimer's - - just because after running tons of Barnes Maze tests on mice, I believe that the visualizations, produced by the living organism itself, can actually activate neural connections more efficiently than any environmental visual cues.
    For example, I noticed that a mouse relies on its own shadow in the process of finding a box in Barnes Maze more than on any visual cues on the walls... I am thinking of trying to produce a new information from "inside" rather than from "outside" by using psilocybin or better, DMT (ayahuasca) in the animal model. Thoughts? Wanted to send you the video but can't attach it here...

    I was recording marijuana effects on the positive reward brain system in rat in vivo.. so I think this could be possible..

    Also, it looks like there is an increased in funding for study Alzheimer's.

    Hope all is well and thank you so much as always!

    ReplyDelete
  3. RhyothemisJune 1, 2021 at 7:55 AM

    Psychedelics for AD sounds interesting. I had just come across something on mental imagery used as therapy for people with PD; it is being done at Yale by Sule Tinaz
    https://www.tinazlab.com/research

    There's something I would like to see trialed in a mouse model of neurodegeneration - shikimic acid. It was used as a topical for skin aging, the mechanism looks like it might be similar to ISRIB. https://rhyobrain.blogspot.com/2021/05/shikimic-acid-skin-cell-senence.html

    Don't worry about the video; I don't think I would have anything intelligent to say since I don't know much about mice. It is good that you are so observant of your mice. I once interviewed for a PhD program in immunology in which a professor told me he made a knock-out mouse strain to study the effect of a particular gene on the immune system. This was before CRISPR, so it took a lot of time and money to create these mice. He said he went to a conference and found that another researcher had been working on the homolog in humans as it relates to a form of congenital blindness. He asked me, "I went home, and you know what I found?" I was dumbfounded since all I could think was "how could you not notice the mice were blind?" [the speech issue is an autism symptom] So after a while he went on to answer himself, "The mice were blind!"

    Later I managed to ask, "Why did no one notice that the mice were blind?" and he said something about not handling them very much, and they use their whiskers and nose for sensing. However, I could not understand why at the time there were apparently no standard batteries of tests for phenotype mandated by NIH.

    ReplyDelete

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