What is it about?
Cold environmental conditions can have profound and long-term effects on animals. However, it has so far been difficult to be clear about what those effects are. This is partly because it is possible that several things could be affected and because the whole system (all of the different tissues and organs in the whole body) could be affected. We decided to investigate this to try to identify changes that occurred.
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Photo by Mert Guller on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our systemic analysis found that there were changes at the molecular level and also that different organs responded differently. It was clear that the analyses done before, that looked at single tissue types, were therefore not enough to understand what was happening. This showed the value of systemic analyses and highlights the importance of systemic analyses in understanding environmental stresses on animals.
Perspectives
This study was great to do because it made use of existing data, analysed in a new way. We were able to show something new without needing to collect lots of new data. It was also good to do because it showed how analysing the whole system can reveal aspects of the system's behaviour that can't be seen from individual tissues. This informs how future studies can be put together to test more thoroughly.
Samuel Furse
University of Cambridge
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Systemic analysis shows that cold exposure modulates triglyceride accumulation and phospholipid distribution in mice, PLoS ONE, November 2024, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0313205.
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