mouse

Now, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital have analyzed the entire mouse intestine, mapping gene expression and cell states and location in the healthy gut and in response to perturbations such as inflammation.

In 2021, Mayassi, who spent his PhD studying immune responses in the intestine, teamed up with Li, a computational biologist, to build a comprehensive map of gene expression across the entire mouse small intestine and colon using spatial transcriptomics and computational approaches.

They also deleted the gene for PDAP1 in a mouse model of hepatitis A.

First study author and former Duke research scholar Ayman Youssef, MD, a clinical fellow of autonomics at Vanderbilt Medical Center, analyzed data identifying that inhibiting SUMOylation, through genetic or drug-based approaches, dramatically slowed disease progression in mouse models.

"Essentially, we found that the most commonly used mouse strain in biomedical research has sex-specific sleep behavior and that a failure to properly account for these sex differences can easily lead to flawed interpretations of data," said first author Grant Mannino, who graduated with degrees in psychology and neuroscience and was named outstanding undergraduate of the College of Arts and Sciences in May.