Refinement of inducible gene deletion in embryos of pregnant mice.

CreERT2-mediated gene recombination is widely applied in developmental biology research. Activation of CreERT2 is typically achieved by injection of tamoxifen in an oily vehicle into the peritoneal cavity of mid-gestation pregnant mice. This can be technically challenging and adversely impacts welfare.

Mouse whole embryo culture: Evaluating the requirement for rat serum as culture medium.

Background: Whole embryo culture is a valuable research method in mammalian developmental biology and birth defects research, enabling longitudinal studies of explanted organogenesis-stage rodent embryos. Rat serum is the primary culture medium, and can sustain growth and development over limited periods as in utero. However, the cost, labor, and time to produce culture serum are factors limiting the uptake of the methodology.

Neurovascular sequestration in paediatric malaria is visible clinically in the retina.

Retinal vessel changes and retinal whitening, distinctive features of malarial retinopathy, can be directly observed during routine eye examination in children with cerebral malaria. We investigated their clinical significance and underlying mechanisms through linked clinical, clinicopathological and image analysis studies. Orange vessels and severe foveal whitening (clinical examination, n = 817, OR, 95% CI: 2.

Biomechanical coupling facilitates spinal neural tube closure in mouse embryos.

Neural tube (NT) formation in the spinal region of the mammalian embryo involves a wave of "zippering" that passes down the elongating spinal axis, uniting the neural fold tips in the dorsal midline. Failure of this closure process leads to open spina bifida, a common cause of severe neurologic disability in humans. Here, we combined a tissue-level strain-mapping workflow with laser ablation of live-imaged mouse embryos to investigate the biomechanics of mammalian spinal closure.