Rinse and Repeat

You’ve probably heard the axiom about autism’s infamous variability: If you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism — meaning that every child shows a unique combination of atypical behaviors. The same could be said for a mouse carrying an autism-linked genetic glitch.Mice may all look alike but, like people, they carry different combinations of background genes that may interact with a given mutated gene. They also have variable exposures in utero and experiences after birth that may influence the expression of genes. Even if all of these variables were the same, no two mice, like no two people, will respond to a given situation in exactly the same way.And yet, most studies are designed as if mice were all the same.Researchers typically use only one ‘cohort,’ a group of about three dozen mice, for a given set of experiments. In the handful of studies that have used more than one cohort — the latest of which came out 9 May in the Journal of Neuroscience — sometimes the results hold up, and sometimes they don’t.Read more at...SFARI, May 2012.