This week, we finally got to hear what everyone in the program has been up to for the last month and I’m impressed. There is such a diverse array of subjects, questions, and techniques we as a program have become involved with and I can tell how excited many of my peers are about their work.
I want to talk a bit about Natalia’s work with neuropathy at the Ji lab. I found her presentation to be informative, clear, and exciting. Natalia also happens to be working just 2 floors above me in MSRBIII, and it’s great to now understand what she’s doing after we happen to get on the same elevator heading to work. It’s also cool that one building can host so many diverse research projects: from studying mouse pain receptors to human gut bacteria and everything in between.
What especially intrigued me in Natalia’s chalk talk was the idea of sexual dimorphism. To recognize that a common and accepted method of chronic pain treatment in male mice just *doesn’t work* for female mice is fascinating to me. I also wonder- in the specific lens of neuropathy- is one sex more susceptible? And do other treatments work only on females because of divergent receptors/neurons? I know that anatomy and physiology of different sexes are divergent but I would have thought something like pain and response to pain/pain treatment would be consistent for all mice as opposed to obviously sexually dimorphic systems like the reproductive or endocrine systems. Many studies only use one sex in mice. Understanding Animal Research says 80% of drug studies only use male mice and other types of studies show the same trend (https://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/why-we-need-female-mice-in-drug-
trials#:~:text=About%2080%25%20of%20rodent%20drug,diffe
rently%20in%20men%20and%20women). How much does this leave out of the picture? Fields dealing with sex chromosome inheritance or mating behavior shouldn’t be the only ones considering gender in their studies of mice, flies, and even human subjects (in fact, especially human subjects as they are often the final destination for our findings). This would help understand disease and biology on a deeper level, as we know many conditions (not just genetic ones) present differently in men and women.
I also appreciated this talk because it very clearly suggested the implications for the work at hand on a broad scale; Natalia detailed the significance of her (and the lab’s) work through the narrative of the opioid epidemic and finding better treatments for chronic pain. This really helped me answer the question “why care?” which is a key component in science communication. Natalia, like the rest of B-SURF, did a great job relaying her science despite only having recently discovered her specific project.
