Social stress may precipitate psychopathological disorders in susceptible individuals. The present experiments were focused on the biology beyond the differential susceptibility to social stress. Social defeat, an ethologically relevant stressor known to elicit different coping strategies, was used in two mouse strains differing for baseline emotionality, such as C57BL6/J and BalbC. In separate...

PURPOSE To investigate cardiomyopathy in offspring in a mouse model of pregestational type 1 diabetic pregnancy. METHODS Pregestational diabetes was induced with STZ administration in female C57BL6/J mice that were subsequently mated with healthy C57BL6/J males. Offspring were sacrificed at embryonic day 18.5 and 6-week adolescent and 12-week adult stages. The size and number of cardiomyocyte...

OVE26 (OVE) diabetic mice on the inbred strain FVB are a valuable model of diabetic nephropathy that excretes the highest amount of urine albumin of all diabetic mouse models. Crossing of OVE mice to C57BL6 or DBA2 mice reduced albuminuria 17-fold in F1 diabetic offspring without reducing diabetes. When comparing renal histology of OVE mice on the FVB background to F1 C57BL6 crosses, we found t...

Coccidioides posadasii causes coccidioidomycosis, or Valley fever, in the endemic regions of the Southwestern United States. The susceptibility to C. posadasii infection has been attributed to a decreased Th1 cellular response. APCs, especially dendritic cells (DCs), play an important role in the activation of Th1 response. In this study, we investigated the efficacy of a DC-based vaccine again...

OBJECTIVE The tight skin (Tsk-1) mouse has been proposed as a model for systemic sclerosis on the basis of increased accumulation of collagen and glycosaminoglycans in the skin, and by the presence of serum autoantibodies. The genetic basis of the mutation has been identified as a genomic duplication within the fibrillin-1 (Fbn-1) gene that results in a larger than normal Fbn-1 transcript, but ...

Mutagenesis screens can establish mouse models of utility for the study of critical biological processes such as iron metabolism. Such screens can produce mutations in novel genes or establish novel alleles of known genes, both of which can be useful tools for study. In order to identify genes of relevance to hematologic as well as other phenotypes, we performed N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea mutagenesi...

Abstract Maternal over-nutrition increases the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular events in offspring. While prominent effects on health are observed, impact platelet physiology has not been studied. Here, we examined whether maternal high-fat diet (HF) ingestion affects function lean obese C57BL6/N mice dams were given a HF or control (C) for 8 weeks before during pregnancy. Male female offsp...

BACKGROUND Linezolid (LZD) is beneficial to patients with MRSA pneumonia, but whether and how LZD influences global host lung immune responses at the mRNA level during MRSA-mediated pneumonia is still unknown. METHODS A lethal mouse model of MRSA pneumonia mediated by USA300 was employed to study the influence of LZD on survival, while the sublethal mouse model was used to examine the effect ...

The mouse has become an indispensable and versatile model organism for the study of development, genetics, behavior, and disease. The application of comprehensive gene expression profiling technologies to compare normal and diseased tissues or to assess molecular alterations resulting from various experimental interventions has the potential to provide highly detailed qualitative and quantitati...