Soon after reproductive and developmental biologist Sudhansu Dey's group at the University of Kansas moved to new quarters at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., they began noticing that once well-established results on uterine gene expression and reproductive function in female mice procured from the same supplier, and of the same genetic strain, had become a lot less predictable. Three years later, they seem to have discovered the ghost in the cage: rodent chow.
In a study published last month in the