There’s growing evidence that sex-based differences can influence phenotypes beyond those directly related to the reproductive system; to fully understand a gene’s function, researchers should consider both male and female subjects.

Researchers are building better barcodes and combining spatial and temporal tools to trace cell lineages from the earliest stages of animal development—and beyond.

Despite several therapeutics showing promise in nonclinical studies, survival from ovarian cancer remains poor. New technologies are urgently needed to optimize the translation of nonclinical studies into clinical successes. While most nonclinical settings utilize subjective measures of physiological parameters, which can hamper the accuracy of the results, this study assessed the physical activity

Cortico-striatal circuits are at the heart of many brain disorders, which means they are often studied using neurobiological animal models. A new study uses resting-state functional connectivity to assess homologies of cortico-striatal circuits in mice, monkeys, and humans.

As metagenomics advances, virus hunters are finding novel infections in colonies of laboratory mice across the world. What that means for scientific research and the animals themselves can depend on the mouse.

Zebrafish have a 50-year history as a model organism for studying vertebrate developmental biology and more recently have emerged as a powerful model system for studying vertebrate microbiome assembly, dynamics and function. In this Review, we discuss the strengths of the zebrafish model for both observational and manipulative microbiome studies, and we highlight some of the important insights gleaned

Recombinase-expressing mice are selected based on where and when they will activate conditional alleles, but some produce phenotypes in isolation that can complicate analysis of those alleles.

Differential gene expression based on the parental origin can have a big impact on phenotype

Caged neurotransmitters are widely used to study neurobiological processes such as synaptic transmission and plasticity. However, uncaging has been primarily restricted to in vitro and ex vivo experimental systems. Using caged neurotransmitters in vivo has posed a huge hurdle because photoactivatable cages bind to GABA-A receptors, acting as competitive antagonists towards GABA. This reduced inhibition

Vasculature has an essential role both in central nervous system health and diseases. A new optimized imaging and analysis pipeline helps to characterize blood vessel network topology and plasticity across large regions in detail.

As COVID-19 continues to spread, the urgency of the hunt for effective therapeutics and vaccines has likewise grown. As with past outbreaks, animal models will be an important component of efforts to understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes disease, and how best to defeat it.