Building a Better ... Mouse Zap?
A team of UC Irvine and European scientists say their experiments with laboratory mice suggest that humans’ ability to handle stress may be linked to a protein in the brain. The scientists’ findings appeared in the August issue of Proceedings, a journal of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dear Mom and Dad,
You told me to write you from college, but you probably weren’t expecting a letter so quickly. I won’t say I’m homesick, but I miss you and everyone else desperately.
Don’t get me wrong, the Irvine campus is great. I look out my window and see nothing but woods, open fields and construction sites with big dirt piles.
It’s everything a mouse could want.
It’s just that. . . .
Remember how we’d sit around and talk about me being the first mouse in the family to go to college? Dad, I remember the tears in your eyes when you said there hadn’t been anyone in the last 4,321 generations who hadn’t spent his whole life holed up in a dingy basement, sneaking upstairs after midnight for crumbs and living in fear of cats. “Not my son,” you said.
I know you guys sacrificed to make this happen, so please don’t take any of this as complaining.
I’m in the Science Department, as you know. I have a pretty nice cage, and they keep the cheese fresh. But for some reason I wasn’t expecting to be double-bunked. My roommate, a fifth-year senior, is from San Clemente and has a million stories.
We spend most of our days on the treadmill. No problem; it’s what I signed up for. I don’t even mind the maze, although it gets so boring that every so often, just for fun, I act completely befuddled and run into the walls. Whenever I do, the grad students scurry around, huddle and jot down notes.
Now for the “incident,” as I’m calling it.
Sometime back, they took a bunch of us to a lab we’d never seen before. We all knew something was up, and I specifically overheard the researchers talking about “stress adaptation” and “genetic mutation.”
You won’t believe what happened next! They did some mixing and matching, and some of the guys came out a little different than when they went in, if you get my drift.
The rumor was that some of the guys had their brains and other organs removed. Not only that, something called “receptor-binding” was done on some of their brain membranes (I am not making this up!).
The whole idea, as we understood it, was to see how we reacted to certain stressful situations, depending on whether we had this certain protein called OFQ/N in our brains or not.
The docs assured us that everything they did was approved by animal-ethics people, but that didn’t mean we weren’t freaked out.
Once they had a group of us “regular” mice, and the other “not-so-regular” mice, they ran us through a bunch of tests. The whole idea was to see who got real nervous and who stayed calm.
The whole thing’s a blur, but I remember being put in a box with a couple different chambers, one dark and one lighted, connected by a tunnel. At one point, some kind of electrical charge zapped my tail but it didn’t last long, and it didn’t hurt that much. But then worst of all, they dunked us in some kind of pool, where we had to swim around in milky water for 10 minutes.
I could tell some guys were acting differently. They must have been the ones that had their brains scrambled. They ran around like they’d never seen a maze or water before. It was obvious they weren’t handling the stress very well.
Other than a getting a couple mouthfuls of goopy water, I got out of the whole thing OK. I found out later, though, that they videotaped everything we did and reported it to some national organization of scientists.
Do you have any idea how cheap that made us feel? Later that night I got to thinking, if they’re going to treat us like that, why not just get hamsters?
Well, I’ve learned it does no good to explain around here.
The docs were thrilled. In their paper, they wrote: “OFQ/N deficient mice could provide a useful model for the development of novel therapeutic strategies in the treatment of psychiatric disorders that are accompanied by an increased stress susceptibility.”
As usual, good for humans, not so good for us mice. But I guess it means I made the history books. I hope you’re proud of me.
Well, you told me college would be challenging.
I had no idea how right you were. Suddenly, the thought of Fluffy chasing me around the house all night doesn’t sound so bad. Tell her “hi” for me.
Hope this letter doesn’t upset you. I’ll try to be cheerier next time.
Your loving son,
Squeaky
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