The medical research on human subjects has to respect the ethical principles included in the Declaration of Helsinki and the additional constraints imposed by the local Institutional Review Board (IRB). These mandatory rules limit exploration of the molecular phenomena to tissues removed in routine surgery (eventually spread into immortalized cell cultures), imaging and other non-invasive investigations, and analyses of blood and body waste. Nonetheless, one needs to replicate human diseases on animal models that, although restricted to protocol approved by the local Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), still allow otherwise never acceptable studies on living humans.
Like humans, animal features depend on species, strain, sex, age, developmental stage and hormonal status, diet, exposure to oxygen deprivation, toxins, radiation, external stimuli, and stress among many others. Moreover, the subcellular localization of certain proteins not only differs between sexes but also changes during the estrogen cycle, making the female animal models much more difficult to manage and interpret than their male counterparts. Therefore, choosing the right animal model is far from an easy task. Furthermore, sanitary precautions and housing conditions (distribution of cages and vicinity of other caged animals, chow and water abundance and quality, environmental temperature, humidity, day and night lighting cycles) are also major modulators of the experimental results. Albeit eliminating the hetero-cellular ambiguity of the tissue, studies on cultured cells are affected by alterations resulting from preparation (isolation from the original tissue, coloring and immortalization) and replacement of their natural environment with an artificial medium.
The goal of this Research Topic is to discuss the accuracy of the animal models for human diseases and the biological, technological, experimental, computational and bioinformatics challenges faced in molecular studies of neurological disorders on these models. We encourage authors to contribute to this Research Topic on the following themes:
- biomarkers and development of transgenic animal models
- induction of neurological diseases though chemical, hormonal and external stimuli
- design and quantification of behavioral studies
- optimized animal housing
- dissection of specialized brain regions
- optimized experimental protocols
- fresh vs immortalized cell cultures
- monocultures vs cocultures
- computational modeling
- technology limitations and noise
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Methods
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Article types
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
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