Mice are a crucial resource for the scientific community. Scientific researchers from numerous disciplines use the mouse as a model to mimic and recapitulate diseases and test scientific questions related to human health and disease. These efforts include basic research, studies on the pathogenesis of disease, therapeutics to treat disease, markers for the diagnosis of disease, and strategies (e.g., vaccines) to prevent disease (Figure 1).

A recent study by a team of researchers at the Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC) and Texas Biomedical Research Institute, in collaboration with Washington University in St. Louis, highlights ORIP’s commitment to supporting high-impact animal research to better understand the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

For biologists, cryopreservation holds major potential for numerous areas of research. The process of vitrifying (i.e., storing in glass to avoid the damaging effects of ice) biological samples—ranging from single cells to whole organisms—can be applied to such areas as biopharmaceutical testing, biological dressings, cell transplantation, and maintenance of genetic stocks.

In recent years, scientists have grown increasingly aware of the importance of conducting research that is both rigorous and reproducible. The need for increased rigor (robustness and lack of bias) and reproducibility (the ability to be repeated biologically, analytically, systemically, or conceptually) affects all areas of science, but approaches for ensuring scientific rigor differ among scientific disciplines.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (ORIP) supports many resource centers that develop animal models for research.

A state-of-the-art flow cytometer awarded to West Virginia University (WVU) in 2013 has helped investigators make scientific advances across a remarkably wide range of disciplines. West Virginia is among the Institutional Development Award (IDeA)–eligible states, which are those that historically have had low levels of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.

To understand human physiology and the pathology of diseases, it is important to investigate the underlying biological processes on all spatial scales. These scales range from the patient to organs, to tissues within an organ, to individual cells within the tissue, to molecular machines within the cells, down to the atomic level. The detailed knowledge of macromolecular interactions within and in between cells in a given tissue, combined with an integrated view of an organism, significantly increases the chances for finding new cures.

More than 30 years after the adult nervous system and cell lineage of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans were first mapped,¹ that map of neuron connectivity (i.e., the connectome) still enables scientists to better understand diverse neurobiological mechanisms. Today, C. elegans remains a widely used model for neuroscience research because of its short life cycle, transparent body, and homology to human genes expressed in neurodevelopment.