Laboratory for Animal Social Evolution and Recognition, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Laboratory for Animal Social Evolution and Recognition, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2023 Sep;152:105238. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105238. Epub 2023 May 22.
Social experiences are strongly associated with individuals' health, aging, and survival in many mammalian taxa, including humans. Despite their role as models of many other physiological and developmental bases of health and aging, biomedical model organisms (particularly lab mice) remain an underutilized tool in resolving outstanding questions regarding social determinants of health and aging, including causality, context-dependence, reversibility, and effective interventions. This status is largely due to the constraints of standard laboratory conditions on animals' social lives. Even when kept in social housing, lab animals rarely experience social and physical environments that approach the richness, variability, and complexity they have evolved to navigate and benefit from. Here we argue that studying biomedical model organisms outside under complex, semi-natural social environments ("re-wilding") allows researchers to capture the methodological benefits of both field studies of wild animals and laboratory studies of model organisms. We review recent efforts to re-wild mice and highlight discoveries that have only been made possible by researchers studying mice under complex, manipulable social environments.
社会经验与许多哺乳动物（包括人类）的个体健康、衰老和生存密切相关。尽管生物医学模式生物（特别是实验鼠）是许多其他生理和发育基础的健康和衰老的模型，但它们仍然是解决健康和衰老的社会决定因素方面尚未解决的问题的工具不足，包括因果关系、依存性、可逆性和有效干预。这种状况在很大程度上是由于标准实验室条件对动物社会生活的限制。即使被安置在群居环境中，实验动物也很少经历接近它们进化所需要的丰富性、可变性和复杂性的社会和物理环境。在这里，我们认为，在复杂的半自然社会环境下（“复育”）研究生物医学模式生物，可以让研究人员同时获得野生动物实地研究和模式生物实验室研究的方法学优势。我们回顾了最近复育老鼠的努力，并强调了只有在复杂的、可操纵的社会环境下研究老鼠的研究人员才能发现的发现。
