MENOPAUSAL MICE MAY HOLD KEY TO CONTROL BREAKTHROUGH^-.

摘要

Dr. Loretta Mayer, a researcher studying heart disease in menopausal women in the 1990s, needed a non-reproductive animal model for experimentation. When she began publishing papers about the menopausal mouse she and her team had created, a global group of scientists focused on solving Southeast Asia's food shortage took note. They reached out to Mayer with a challenge."They said, 'If you can make a mouse non-reproductive for the purpose of research, surely you can make a rat non-reproductive for the purpose of food security,'" recounts Mayer. "Rats had been consuming or damaging 20 to 40 percent of the crops that were desperately needed for human consumption. A study in Indonesia revealing that a 50-percent drop in the female rat population would cut rat-induced crop damage by 80 percent convinced us to take our technology in this new direction."