A mouse eats his fill, but the calorie restriction rodents generally live longer.
Steve Berger / Wikimedia
The National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, revealed earlier this month it will gradually withdraw its colony of calorie-restricted rodents. Although most researchers who study aging will not be affected by the decision, some scientists will have to pay much more for the experimental mice, and some may be priced out of the ground.
In the 1930s, researchers first noticed that a very low calorie diet extends life of some animals. This scheme, known as calorie restriction (CR), also retards age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. For nearly 20 years, NIA has sponsored a colony of calorie-restricted rodents, which are available only to its beneficiaries. The price was right: Until this year, researchers paid $ 6 a month for the freshest age of the animal. And because of a rule change which came into force in January 2014, the rodents are now free.
Despite the low price, there is not much appetite for CR mice. Just eight to 10 researchers ask the animals of the colony each year, said Nancy Nadon NIA, chief of biological resources department. June 11, NIA announced it would not renew the contract with the company that hosts rodent, Charles River Laboratories in Wilmington, Massachusetts. "The way the use has changed in recent years," says Nadon, "it was not the best way to go about using funds from the NIA." (She had no estimate of what the maintenance costs of the colony.)
the decision will not exclude the access of researchers to CR mice immediately. New rodents enter the colony until 2018, so that older mice should be available in 2020. And NIA will continue to maintain a separate colony of aged rodents. If the NIA-funded researchers are desperate for CR animals, Nadon said it might be possible to transfer some of these mice at a reduced speed.
Few researchers are likely to miss the colony. Most scientists who rely on the CR rodents raise their own institutions, so that "for most researchers, this decision will not have any effect," wrote the gerontological researcher Valter Longo of the University of California South Los Angeles in an e-mail to S ciency Insider. in addition, the colony produces no sound scientific enough, said Roger McDonald, a physiologist and cell biologist who is on the point of retiring from the University of California, Davis.
Yet some researchers will be sad to see the colony will, although they understand the financial constraints of the NIA. "I think that it is a valuable and unique resource, and I hate to see that lost, "said Arlan Richardson physiologist at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City.
most affected will be researchers who can not raise their own CR animals, or "who are early in their career or just starting out in search CR" says Richard Weindruch, a gerontologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Vascular physiologist Anthony Donato of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City agrees. "They close the ability of some young researchers to pursue research of calorie restriction," he said. In large part, this is because of the often higher cost of raising CR mice yourself. He noted that the animals of the NIA, which was approximately 30 months, cost him about $ 0 to $ 130 each. But raise them in his university, which now plans to Donato, will run about $ 1 a day and the mouse will stay on the strict diet for more than 2 years. He can afford the higher cost, but other researchers can not.
Plans Another user of the CR settlement NIA, nutritional immunologist Elizabeth Gardner of Michigan State University in East Lansing, also rethink and budgets. She received the NIA mouse since the late 190s, using them for three or four projects, including a 2011 paper that showed calorie restriction reduces the ability of animals to recover from vaccines against influenza. Now, Gardner said, she intends to obtain age mouse animal colony of the NIA and calorically restrict itself, "but it will be more expensive."
Gerontologist Richard Miller of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, worries that the arrest colony CR omens shortages NIA colony of older rodents, which most scientists depend. Because NIA can not pay for the animals, it can not recover all the costs of providing. "I do not see how they [NIA] can afford to give the mice they used to sell," he said. It is concerned that NIA will also eventually have to reduce the number of animals it provides.
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