GingaNinga

In general Its nearly impossible to do vegan microbiology, everything contains animal products. mouse/goat/rabbit antibodies, bacterial culture plates require nutrients and they’re usually sheep or horse blood-based. Even cell cultures are technically live organisms, but so are plants I suppose.

my boss is vegan actually lol. i guess its like penance.

formic acid is also a rapid fixitive and decalcifier. We use it to treat bones to make them softer for histology so we can slice them into 4um cross sections (thats how microscope slides are made, then we stain them with pretty colours)

I owe my master’s degree to that website

Mice are excellent models for many diseases but not all. When possible we study cell culture, then mice, then humans and there are rigorous ethics committees that require justification for the study, we don’t just do these studies for no reason. Their metabolism and physiology is pretty similar to ours, which makes them useful to study inflammation, cancer, diabetes and other malignant/metabolic/genetic disorders. They have a 21 day gestation period and research mice are essentially all clones which eliminates genetic variability as a factor (making them excellent for reproducibility in a timely manner)

some drawbacks include the spine, they’re haunched which makes it difficult to study something like scoliosis, we do this in zebrafish actually. Also I believe they have some mild immunological differences like ratio of circulating white cells and bone marrow differentials and minor differences in some proteins. Basically anyone doing these studies has years of training and really knows what they are doing, they would not be allowed to conduct them unless it was absolutely necessary to answer a specific question. Mouse work is a lot more complicated/interesting than this but I think I’ve made my point for now.

Source: wrote a portion of my thesis on justification of using an animal model for obesity research, then an 8 year career in a pathology core/phenotyping lab.

micrometer scale is massive for viruses, thats the size of a small cell.

starlings like to drop their shit in our pool but stop when the hawks/flacons start flying around.

I feel like bees are a bit of a grey area. We’re not eating them, we’re kind of like landlords that give them a nice place to stay and they pay rent in honey. I’m not vegan so I’m not quite sure what the rationale is for bee stuff.