Natural infection in mouse house: an opportunity or a problem ?

Today in my lab, an infection (Spironucleus muris) has been diagnosed on the mice of our animal facility. The bad news is that infection will ruin all the results from immunological studies because the infection will interfere with the immunological process we wish to study.

Having an infection in animal facilities is quite well-known phenomena for a “mouse” immunologist (an immunologist who performs experiment with mice) but is new for me.  Before I used to work on human cells and organs.

Rather than being desperate, it brings me some fresh air. It is an occasion to study a natural infection. For those of you who are not familiar with immunology, if you were looking at our protocol you could imagine chicken ovalbumine is the worst cause of infection on Earth. Ovalbumine is indeed used as a model in immunology because mice don’t eat chicken and it is supposed that they have never been exposed to chicken protein. As a result, you can control better your experimental setup. Moreover ovalbumine is easy to produce in large quantity as it is the main component of eggs.

A natural infection could be seen as a real opportunity. First, it allows to study the ecology of an infection in mice in a lab. It could be a model as good as ovalbumine. I was really disappointed not to find more articles on that topic on pubmed. Immunologists could try to develop vaccines or treatments for mice.. Moreover we could think that having a patent  and selling a treatment or vaccine could finance your research as the problem is not isolated.