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0:00
My name is Axel Kornerup Hansen,
and I will introduce
you to how important
the microbiome is
for the modeling of
human diseases in animals,
especially in mice.
0:12
I worked with animal models and
bacteria for almost 40 years.
Today, I'm a professor in
laboratory animal science
and welfare at the vet school
of the University of Copenhagen.
Through this work, I have
had several collaborations
with commercial enterprises,
which, of course, can give
some conflicts of interest.
0:31
Laboratory rodents
are normally produced
as specific pathogen-free, SPF.
That means that they are housed
and produced under
ultra-hygienic conditions,
rendering them
free of pathogens.
But unfortunately,
also have a range of
microorganisms which may be
essential for the modeling
of human diseases.
0:56
A main issue with rodent
disease models has
over the last decades been that
they very frequently are
difficult to reproduce.
That means, to get
the same results
in new but similar studies.
Also, often rodent studies
translate poorly into humans.
That means much
preclinical research fails
when data from
rodents are used to
set up clinical
studies in humans.
This is known as a
reproducibility crisis.
1:27
One explanation for this
lack of reproducibility
may be that we fail to consider
that we buy other stuff
when we buy a mouse.
1:39
When the laboratory mouse is
delivered from a
commercial breeder,
you will, in addition
to the mouse,
with its approximately
20000 number of genes,
also get maybe 1000
different microbes,
which in numbers may be 10^14,
and which contain maybe two
million microbial genes.
That means the microbes have
a much higher capacity than
the mammal host itself,
and much of what
the mouse can do
is actually done
by the microbes.
The bacteriome consists of
more or less the same
bacterial phyla as in humans.
Deferribacteres accepted because
this is normally part of
a starting culture when starting
up new rodent colonies.
However, the abundances may
differ essentially
between mice and humans.
In addition to the bacteriome,
we also have the virome,
the mycobiome, and
the parasitome.
Many of these are
commensals or symbionts.
But within all groups,
there are also pathogens.
Although these are
unwanted because
disease is unwanted in
our laboratory animals,
pathogens may also
be important for
the induction of certain
rodent models for
human diseases.
