Labanimal

The August episode of 3-Minute 3Rs. Papers: 1. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw4099 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31026040 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31343844 [LA] Nociception is the sense that tells animals they are encountering a potentially damaging stimulus. In people, we call it pain. Most pain research is done with rodents, but nociception is pretty well conserved beyond mammals. That includes invertebrates, such as the fruit fly. Some work has been done in larval drosophila, but larvae exist in a transient state; any quote unquote pain is therefore transient too. To study longer lasting changes in nociception, University of Sydney researcher Greg Neely recent;y described his lab’s efforts to develop an adult fly model. They took advantage of the fly’s natural aversion to surface temperatures above 42 degrees Celsius, and show that after peripheral injury-in this case, a leg amputation-the flys thermal sensitivity changes in a chronic manner. Looking deeper, they