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For the past several years, science has been plagued by what some consider a reproducibility crisis—the idea that many published studies don’t yield the same results when repeated by other scientists, or sometimes even by the same scientists. Surveys and studies have suggested myriad reasons such as unreliable reagents and cell lines, selective statistics, a bias for publishing studies with positive results, and genetic differences in animal models.
Andreas Bäumler, a microbiologist and immunologist at the University of California, Davis, and his team recently published evidence in Nature Microbiology last month (March 25) that, at least in some mouse studies, the problem may come down to the bacteria in the model’s gut. They found that mice of the same strain but purchased from different vendors had different susceptibilities to infection during experiments, a phenomenon that could be explained by varying microbiomes.
“It’s basically a very well-done ...
