Why does work on same mouse models give different results?

摘要

Your News Q&A article 'Lab disinfectant harms mouse fertility' (Nature 453,964; 2008) must have set tongues wagging in coffee rooms throughout academia. We experienced a similar catastrophe, which took two years and exhaustive detective work to resolve, simply because we moved laboratories. Our research relies on a widely used model of allergic lung inflammation, in which mice are exposed to a model allergen. While we were working at the University of Cambridge, the model was always reproducible. But when we returned to Ireland to continue this research, we found the lung physiology of the control mice was inexplicably abnormal for the first year.