Rodents - Science topic

Dear Dr. Kovalchuk,

You are welcome! It's always a pleasure to share information, especially in an interesting topic such as bioerosion in turtle shells, that is generating some very interesting research lately.

Best regards,

Joaquin Pedro

I am not an expert in rodent incisors but a key feature that applies to both human and most mammal incisors:

Incisal wear, for the upper teeth the buccal surface is longer and for the lower the lingual surface is longer.

Hope it helps.

Image from Fondriest et al 2012

There are two ways to organize your images: either place them in your text next to the paragraph where you discuss them (Figure 1), or put them all together at the end of the essay (Figure 2). Images always need captions. Captions should do two things; label the image and tell us the image's source.( taken from Google 1ly) for research paper purpose

我想我可以帮你。你能留下一个联系电话吗？

Hi Michael, I think it is working with immunostaining stain and western blot as well please check this link of the Promega

we did not use individual tagging for newborn rodents

Hi Beth Worley !

I did an experiment years ago administering rosiglitazone in rodent chow. By that time, I had experience with drugs delivered in the water and orogastric gavage, and I wanted to try another route because of some limitations I had encountered in the former routes.

First, I searched for the dose (mg/kg BW). Then, I estimated the average food intake (g/day) to know how much drug I should add per g of diet. Finally, I bought the drug and send to the company that prepares my purified diets.

It worked nice for rosiglitazone and the other 2 drugs that I used, but it has some limitations.

The first issue is that food intake varies, and on each day, mice will ingest a different amount of food and thus a different medication dose. In addition, if the animal gain or loose weight and does not change food intake, drug doses also change.

Here are the papers with rosiglitazone:

In this paper we discuss routes for drug administration:

Hope this helps!

The most common cause of a foreign body ingestion is when a person unintentionally or unknowingly swallows an object which is either too large, sharp or toxic to pass through the digestive tract without causing potential harm

If you are basing your estimation of the time the birds in question are spending in contact with soil on observations using a unit of time that fits your needs/options for observation seems reasonable. Take your whole observation time and subdivide into intervals of equal length documenting all behaviors relevant for your research topic for each interval. You should define different behaviors if you want to document them before the observation (for example by an initial observation phase used to catalogue behaviors).

My (limited) experience is that e.g. in 30 second intervals multiple types of behavior can occur (for example a duck can walk to the edge of pond climb down a little incline to get into the water and start to swim), so very long intervals might not result in accurate documentation of behaviors. But much of this depends on your set up (are you just interested in being in contact with soil or not, or do you want to be able to distinguish between different interactions with the soil, like scratch digging, walking, feeding on soil arthropods etc.; how long will observation be etc.).

Alternatively instead of doing observations yourself you can try to check if there is sufficient literature on the behavior of relevant bird species (documenting time budgets with behaviors useful to address your questions) in the type of ecosystem you are interested in.

Kindly see also the following useful RG links:

Corticosterone is a component of HPA axis, also known as stress axis of body, therefore, it is one of potent marker of anxiety and depression. I suggest you to study the corticosterone along with the CRF in hypothalamus and dopamine level in brain. You can also refer my recent publish paper (1) Mishra A, Singh KP. Neurotensin agonist PD 149163 modulates the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis impairment in lipopolysaccharide-challenged mice. (2) Ankit Mishra and K.P. Singh (2022): Neurotensin agonist PD 149163 modulates the neuroinflammation induced by bacterial endotoxin lipopolysaccharide in mice model.

Certain clues such as insect damage can be easy to diagnose while other things such as a slight color change can indicate a deficiency of a particular nutrient. Abiotic stress often impacts more than one species at a given site (e.g. drought, or too much exposure to water inundation). It really comes down to knowing the plant species and the ecosystem that it occurs in.

If we want to detect infectious agents, there are various histological stains for the agent. however, if we want to look for different cells, we can use immunohistochemical stains. Which different cells do you want to detect?

Thank you Mahour Farzan !

Hi!

The following paper might be a good starting point to find more identification guides.

"Identification of Shrews and Rodents from Skull Remains according to the Length of a Tooth Row" (Balčiauskienė et al. 2002)

doi: 10.1080/13921657.2002.10512524

Hello dear

See attached link please

Hello Nikita,

thank you for sharing this interesting question with the RG community. As an inorganic chemist I'm absolutely no expert in this field and I'm not in the position to provide a qualified answer. However, I made the experience that it often pays off to search the "Questions" and "Publications" section of RG for related questions and useful literature references. For example, please have a look at the answers given to the following closely related technical question which has been posted earlier on RG:

This question has received 10 potentially useful answers. Perhaps the easiest way is to grind the bones using a mortar and pestle containing liquid nitrogen and subsequently extract the RNA, DNA or proteins. For the very convenient use of a Bullet Blender centrifuge which can homogenize tissue and bones using bead disruption please have a look at the following interesting article:

This paper is freely available as public full text on RG. Good luck with your research work!

Dear Nelson,

this is a very interesting technical question which I personally never thought of. To my knowledge, the reason why bumble bees very often nest in abandoned mammal (mice and voles) nests is that they cannot dig themselves. According to many links available on the general internet it is generally accepted that some bumble bees can faintly smell the mice and voles that once built the nest and follow this scent until they find the entrance. Unfortunately I could not yet access a scientific article in which this behavior has been proven.

Good luck with your work!

Search :

Crouched Locomotion in Small Mammals: The Effects of Habitat and Aging

by Angela M Horner (2010)

Thank you Max Anstötz and Paula Parra .

I will try improving the illumination. The size guidance are helpful. Thanks

Hello Cecilia; I have used "thin-wall polycarbonate tubing" for restraining reptiles, including rattlesnakes. It comes in many diameters in stock lengths that are easy to cut. You might try shopping for some of that. Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers

I hope this also may help:

Hi Sirenia,

My message is probably too late. How is your experience with those swivels?

We use a similar swivel for recording rats. They work well mostly but one of three or four makes some noise during spinning. But in generally we are satisfied. Now fortunately there is a big selection of different swivels in amazon. I guess that a bit more expensive one conducts a a better quality signal.

Thank you very much Magne Neby Andrew Hawkey for your suggestions I will definitely have a look into them

Conditioned taste aversion is a long-lasting, standardized test of single-experience memory. In the paper below, rats without extinction training showed a comparable suppression of tastant consumption 5 and 21 days after the initial experience. Presumably, this should last even longer than that without needing retraining.

Rosas, J. M., & Bouton, M. E. (1996). Spontaneous recovery after extinction of a conditioned taste aversion. Animal Learning & Behavior, 24(3), 341-348.

Hi, I have tried this method for fractionation of my HEK293AAV cells. I am checking fractionation purity with GAPDH and mitochondrial gene distribution in both fractions, and I keep getting more mitochondrial gene detection in the nuclear fraction than in the cytoplasmic fraction.

I have checked under the microscope and I can see that the cells have been lysed and the nuclei remain intact. I have also carried extra washing steps to try to minimize cytoplasmic contamination, but it doesn't seem to solve the problem.

Would you suggest anything to improve this?

Thanks a lot!

Yojet,

A nice advantage of neuronal co-cultures of this type (when one can distinguish between the different cells) is that they allow analysis of the behaviour and morphology of both types of neurons side-by-side while reducing culture and staining variability to a minimum.

In the particular case of these papers, it seems to me that the authors want to analyse Shank2/3 role at the postsynapse while keeping presynaptic terminals as WT. Therefore, a "sparse" co-culture helps analysing morphological features while also provides a source for mutant postsynaptic compartments as well as WT presynaptic buttons to form hybrid synapses. I will here admit that I haven't fully read the papers and hence my view could be an oversimplification. So, this is what I got from an overview of the results and what I can assume from my own experience in co-culture.

Hope this may help you.

Cheers,

I would check other values like head-body length to see if there is intrapopulational variation. If the discrepancy is really due to intraspecific variation you would expect linear dimensions to show a similar pattern to body mass, since you would be measuring bigger dimensions on bigger animals.

However, it's also possible that the reported body masses are just plain discrepancies. I've noticed a lot of second-hand databases like PanTheria can be extremely inaccurate when it comes to reporting body mass values because they often just collate them from the previously published literature. A lot of times studies will use ballpark values or the midpoint of guestimated ranges from sources like Walker's Mammals of the World, which aren't very accurate or precise. A good example of this is the South American rodent Dinomys branickii. Most studies using body mass for Dinomys will report a value of 10-15 kg or 13-14 kg, which seems to be drawn from a ballpark range of 10-15 kg mentioned in a paper from the early 20th century (maybe Allen 1942). This doesn't appear to be based on any measured specimens, and no studies list specimens from where these data were collected. However, actual weights of Dinomys based on first-hand measurements of collected wild individuals (e.g., Osbahr et al. 2009, Gottdenker et al. 2001) finds that the body mass of Dinomys is actually only about 9.5 +/- 1.1 kg, a much lower estimate. Larger individuals are known but are highly gravid, captive ones. Nevertheless, people have been reporting a 13-15 kg body mass for Dinomys as if it were gospel.

Hello Russell: Tungsten carbide is used as an abrasive. It comes in grit sizes that vary from extremely fine powder to pretty coarse grit. If you can get permission from collection managers, a heat sterilized jar of the grit of whatever sizes you determine to be appropriate, non-toxic and pest-free. A graduated cylinder provides the volume directly. Were I a collections manager, I can't imagine what the problem would be.

Apparently specimen loans are out of the question. Hmmm.

Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers.

You might want to have a look at Doris (Detection of Object and Tracking) at http://www.boris.unito.it/pages/doris.html . It's a free and open-source software, should be a bit more friendly than DeepLabCut, but I haven't tried it yet.

Chiara

By Rotary evaporator

The following article is a detailed overview of your query. Kindly read it

Shi D, Vine DF. Animal models of polycystic ovary syndrome: a focused review of rodent models in relationship to clinical phenotypes and cardiometabolic risk. Fertility and sterility. 2012 Jul 1;98(1):185-93.

Hi David,

Personally I have only done perfusion on rodents, never done any transcardial perfusion on rabbit yet. Althogh we considered to do a perfusion, but we still collect bone samples of rabbit without perfusion, because they're hard tissue. While in your case, brain samples is fragile, may be much better to collect after perfusion fixation no matter which mammal it is.

There aren't many perfusion protocols for rabbit, and I'm sure you have found solution after 2 years, but I found an article may have this information.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/44B4189099E495B7C4B37339EC8AA4B1/S1551929500057631a.pdf/perfusion_fixation_of_research_animals.pdf?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=2b64124767cbb88f7185358f5373a183fc42c5f2-1609232757-0-AawYF2PiNV1_ooT6D1BNymMAF2dmOGFvQQNkeLczcovKslcz9-Y1oJwNXQKsa61oUS-vVHcqe3PV6pKa3JFtlUwNFzjDshSueJMah5J1O5vSZC9DDbI-N9tlFEyY8p4TxTYAW0BjNvJxer0UtiaOzoonWW6o9bZcL-FW_HiwcHvzOQA_bd4igEt_eoAhQ9160xTV7KKK6ESamvmGdTy8imBu7MMeXI-mnQsaxS3lFKS6Xzb-n_PeKwS6huRCcBp4U0jVdA7b8Ajzx3BEKf95CG8gze7iJzZ6N9Zv9A8_QA_pTnbQfeFde4U_-E4IGOBt4FYEPxNw35fd44zZlTBvIhK7B5Njt_2Eti7g9vmd827IQ2WooylRLW8ACEThorjE72PfZG9fEtLqfiFpvK5jrB52J0pA-cNDg-A54hbDS-fbhF-WO1ti8EiXz-i9-66II0uIiRdBFsjoG0CamT272ssfTP275MXY4Su6Z5rkxfULRsIlFbqHSdEij6AhVasVV7xzGwa3HPL21tqk4dqziaRE8kf6eDI-_bjUX8vQwYYevO2pnQY7cy_xOXTA-Kqkug

We can help with our newly developed MP-500 micropipette puller. Just let us know the specs you requested and will will help figure them out. See file attached for flyer.

Thanks for the reply Mattia, as the animals are currently un-dissected and are in a high number that volume of RNALater wasn't logistically feasible. The sample input for extractions will be fairly large and the RNA will be converted and fragmented to around 150bp for sequencing. Once we begin extractions we will be looking for ribosomal bands to confirm RNA integrity but in the mean time I'm just hoping it is stable within the animal tissue

Hi Brian, thanks a lot for the reply!

Kisspeptins are produced and used during reproduction in birds i.e. are components of reproductive physiology in birds

Hi Patrick,

I don't know of any 'short' reviews of the topic as standalone papers with respect to just rodents, but there are number of important books and papers that cover the social organisation of some of the best studied clades in detail, or will cite literature that does so. Not sure how easy they are to come by though in your case (hopefully there is a good library nearby as not sure many of the chapters are accessible on the internet).

- Wolff and Sherman eds 2007 Rodent Societies

- Bennett and Faulkes 2000 African Mole-Rats: Ecology and Eusociality

- Clutton-Brock 2016 Mammal societies. (you'll have to leaf through to find the relevant literature on rodents)

Other useful papers:

- Armitage 1999 The evolution of sociality in marmots. J Mammal 80: 1-10

- Randall 1994 Convergences and Divergences in Communication and Social-Organization of Desert Rodents. Australian Journal of Zoology. 42(4) 405 - 433

- Ebensperger & Blumstein. 2006. Sociality in New World hystricognath rodents is linked to predators and burrow digging Behavioral Ecology 17: 410–418.

And then there are other useful monographs and treatments of some well-studied species such as mara, capybara, various voles, and of course the naked mole-rat.

You should also be aware of a recent push towards thinking about intraspecific variation in social organisation (see others referenced/cited in/by these two papers):

- Schradin C, Pillay N (2005) Intraspecific variation in the spatial and social organization of the African striped mouse. J Mammal 86:99–107

- Schradin et al. (2018) The evolution of intraspecific variation in social organization. Ethology 124: 527–536.

Hope this is a useful and that others can perhaps expand on this.

Jack

I do not have direct experience in that field, but do have experience using the Echo Meter Touch to record bats. And I have accidentally recorded rodent ultrasound in the past when monitoring for bats with other detectors. Assuming the newborn vocalizations are ultrasonic I see no reason you cannot detect them with the EMT. In the settings you would just want to set the low threshold filter low enough, and you would want to keep Noise files.

Kevin Stevens Thanks Kevin

I mean the shock grids don't work properly and I've checked all part of our treadmill and everything is ok

What I have noticed generally is that, conventionally there's no standardised dose. Inconsistent outcomes have been repeatedly reported. I hope a study into the molecular mechanism is done to confirm the underlying causes.

This article relorted similar thing.

Dear Erika Kathe Croft,

The following article recently published could be useful for you.

Thank you.

Yao, Q., Guo, Y., Xue, J., Kong, D., Li, J., Tian, X., ... & Zhou, T. (2020). Development and validation of a LC-MS/MS method for simultaneous determination of six glucocorticoids and its application to a pharmacokinetic study in nude mice. Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, 179, 112980.

In addition to Thom's answer, this can also be useful: Physical Therapy, Volume 80, Issue 8, 1 August 2000, Pages 782–807, https://doi.org/10.1093/ptj/80.8.782

Francis,

maybe I need to explain better.

One camera produces in one night 40 clips of 3 minutes, total something like 8GB. Most of the stuff there is nothing. Sometimes the camera gets activated but the animal passed before the recording started. Sometimes the animal is only 10 seconds to be seen, but runtime is set to 3 minutes. Every clip has date and time stamp. I do not loose any information if I remove all scenes without target animal. Time elapsed between shots can be determined easily. After reduction there is maybe 10 minutes of mp4 left, size 40 MB. That´s a reasonable size to store and to analyze behaviour. And if one would want to go later through the videos, no need to search 2 hours of mostly empty raw material, the compressed information is available. To do this summary manually takes minimum 2 hours. Boring and total waste of time. Some nights I do have set out 4 or more cameras. This means, somebody has to sit all day long and stare into a screen. I got a lady who does this first step for me. The interesting part starts when I get the edited movie. The direction of my research is the interaction between animal and trap. Trap shyness, trap resistance, humane killing, trip force, trigger function, time between first contact and catch etc. Things would be much cheaper for my customers if I could do this automatically.

Good day!

These protocols are not equivalent, in the second case (20 m/min, 45 min) the running intensity is significantly higher with a sufficiently long exercise duration.

The values would be comparable with an initial speed of 15 m/min for 60 min.

It is very difficult to understand your question anyway sample size is very important and host facilities as well

Hello Sandra Andrea Heldstab,

In this paper (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000494), you can find a time-calibrated tree for 6,000 living species of mammals. In addition, credible sets of mammalian phylogeny are available for download at http://vertlife.org/phylosubsets.

All the Best!

Following.

Hi doctor. You can used the mobil cam.

Cationic surfactants would be more efficient for entacapone, but I am not sure about its safety

Hi there. I use 0.1 MOhm tungsten electrodes. Using 0.5 MOhm or higher impedances didn't give good ltp results with my recordings. Good luck.

This work may be useful for you:

Hi,

isoflurane is usually the best way to anesthetize rodents, it has many advantages compared to ketamine/xylazine injections and other chemicals. Recovery is very quick and you can adjust the flow and percentage in real time.

For euthanasia, the best way might be depending on your institution IACUC's protocols. I know that the preferred methods in France vs the US differ quite a bit in my area. All of these questions could be asked to them as they will provide approval of the animal protocol and useful advice for you in specific settings.

I hope this helps

An automatic open-field ambulation can register circadian rhythm in rodents:

36 hours is a pretty long fast, but mice eat their feces, so if you did not clean the cage when starting the fasting period that might have an impact. When I have to clean the intestines (it was not after PFA perfusion though), I just turn them upside down and use tweezers to empty them and rinse them. Did you try that?

I am leaning towards using CCR2, CD34, & CD117 as markers for peripheral cells... I think I'll stay with Iba1 for microglia... But considering F4/80 and CD68 in the future...

Hey! Just to add to the great answers here:

My go to DCX:

Doublecortin-- shown in purple (Millipore AB2253)-- Guinea Pig--- (1:1000)

I hope this helps!

E

We used the very cheap wheel which is called squirrel wheel in our country, commonly used for hamsters.

Thanks J. C. Tarafdar and Hannan LaGarry

I appreciate your response to my question

With my Best Wishes

What are the pros and cons of the telemetry units? Any suggestions on selecting an ideal EEG recording and analysis equipment for Rodent sleep studies ? I suggest you take a look at the research that is being done in the field of EKG electrocardiogram machine learning based Signal Processing. The telemetry units thereof are autonomy generated communication measurements along with other relevant data that should be collected to detect any visible sign of genome mutation or terminal disease in a living being. In machine leaning, such telemetry units are used to solve visualization based unsupervised learning cluster charts. Good Luck. Beat, T.T.

Although the problem didn't get solved in my case so far. But I read transfer conditions can help. Do try 60 min wet transfer at 100V. The samples should be electrophoresed using 15%gel. My antibody N20 santa cruz could detect 15ng of mBDNF peptide loaded as control on the gel at 14kda , however didn't detect any mBDNF at 14kda for hippocampal lysate and N2a cell lysates loaded. Best of luck to you!

Special 3 ml dilution with 100 mg of tissue

Dear Jef,

thank you. This one I know. Unfortunately seems their is no real competitor on the market.

Dear Pérez-Hernández

I have attached a protocol for synaptoneurosome isolation along with a reference paper. This protocol doesnt need neither ultracentrifuge nor percoll.

Hope this is helpful for the project.

Regards, 

Yogesh Kanna Sathyamoorthy

Mice or rats? A mouse is 30 g, a rat about 300 g. There are web calculators for BSA:

https://www.calculator.net/body-surface-area-calculator.html

Hii Respected Paola

Thank you for your suggestion...yes, I am infusing drug for behavioral anxiety study..

Hey,

do you have any possibility of a positive control? Your protocol seems fine. Did you try an antibody from a different source, not different LOT?

Best

Great answers! I think I got some ideas. Can anyone suggest any paper to follow?

Thanks all.

Monokesh

If you want to determine feed intake, then pellets are to be preferred. Also then the animals can not select individual feed ingredients.

You can calculate fat content from ingredient composition or determine it chemically.

Hi Dylan,

In our lab we dissect mesenteric arteries and coronary atteries with relative ease, using scissors with the same specifications as product FST Item # 15000-03. Best of luck!

contact to Prof. Rajeev patnaik, dept. of Geology, Chandigarh University ( India)as he is working on siwalik rodents set up the bichronology of Siwalik rodents.