This winter vacation, "Rat Dad" spent the New Year with mice in the lab

Xinhua News Agency, Harbin, February 9 Title: This winter vacation, "Rat Dad" spent the New Year with mice in the laboratory

Xinhua News Agency reporters Yang Siqi and Xie Jianfei

An amber box the size of a shoe box is covered with a layer of poplar shavings about 5 centimeters thick, with a faint woody scent. "This is called a cage, and it's a mouse bed." On the 28th of December, at the experimental animal platform of the Life Science Center of Harbin Institute of Technology, the staff member Li Yongming was busy as usual.

Mice are one of the commonly used laboratory animals, which are widely used in life science research, and researchers use mice to conduct various animal experiments. The platform, which has been in service since 2019, has 6 feeding rooms, 3 laboratories and currently has about 5,000 mice. Because he is responsible for mouse breeding, facility and equipment maintenance, Li Yongming and his colleagues are known as "rat fathers" and "mouse mothers".

Walking into a feeding room, you are greeted by a wall of cages, each of which hangs a card that clearly records the type of mouse, birthday and other information. Through the cage, the active mouse is clearly visible.

Li Yongming introduced that these mice weighed up to thirty or forty grams after maturity, some were imported from abroad, the price of a single one exceeded 10,000 yuan, some undertook important expansion tasks, and some were the most direct presentation of experimental results.

The reporter saw that several bags of mouse feed with different packaging were placed on the experimental table, and each package was marked with a name. "The experiments conducted by teachers and students in schools are different, and the requirements for mouse breeding are also different, and the keepers will feed according to the experimental requirements." Li Yongming said.

Mice are inseparable from people. Observe the operation of experimental equipment, record temperature, humidity, pressure difference, etc., change cages for mice twice a week, add drinking water and feed, and disinfect regularly... Li Yongming said that the experimental animal facilities need to operate continuously 24 hours a day, all year round, "this year Chinese New Year's Eve, just I am on duty."

At 6 p.m., graduate student Wang Zhaofeng walked into the platform and sent a packet of mouse feed. As a master's student in neurobiology, his thesis was to study the mechanisms by which zinc ions affect excitatory neurons, requiring 15 to 20 mice to be fed lower zinc-content feeds. "'Rat Dad' and 'Rat Mom' are very attentive, and after about a month and a half, I will be able to analyze and process the experimental data." He said.

With so many mice, where did the utensils go? In the platform washing room, "rat father" Hu Xiaofeng is pouring contaminated shavings into the garbage can, and putting the cage into the cleaning equipment for automatic cleaning. Subsequently, the cleaned cages, lids, water bottles, etc. are put into the autoclave in batches for sterilization.

Huang Zhiwei, professor of Harbin Institute of Technology and director of the Life Science Center, introduced that with the rapid development of life sciences, the basic scientific research conditions of universities have been significantly improved in recent years, providing important support for scientific research in the fields of metabolism, tumor, microbiology and immunology, and more and more important scientific research results have been born from here.

"We are like a screw, although we are not engaged in front-line scientific research, the work we do is very basic, but we hope to do our best to contribute to the development of science and technology." Hu Xiaofeng said.

Source: Xinhua News Agency