Mamels life animal

Among animal models , C. elegans and Drosophila melanogaster are the heavyweight champions in this domain, but when it comes to lactation, as non-mammals they are of limited use. Enter the lab rat, or mouse in this case. Mice allow researchers to systematically investigate mechanistic pathways through which mother’s milk influences offspring neurobiology, immune function, and behavior. Liu and colleagues (2013) investigated these in concert with the precision and dedication of a neuroscientist Sherlock Holmes , reported in Nature Neuroscience, December 2013. in which I write a blog post almost entirely to justify including this image. The target of their research was maternal tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF), one of the traffic controllers of the immune system. TNF is a proinflammatory cytokine that stimulates the acute phase reactions of the immune response system, regulating the actions of other immune cells. Generally always present at low levels, TNF increases physiologically dur

Fifty years ago Devorah Ben Shaul published the seminal paper “The Composition of the Milk of Wild Animals” (1963). She had spent ten years aggregating published papers of milk composition as well as directly analyzing dozens of species’ milks.  Haruo Takino Eyeballing the data from 101 species, Ben Shaul posited that the composition of milks--the percent fat, protein, and sugar--did not necessarily cluster by the evolutionary history of taxonomic groups (aka  phylogeny ). She noted that “grizzly bear milk and kangaroo milk had virtually the same basic milk composition(pg 333).” Ben Shaul hypothesized that milk composition may instead reflect environmental pressures or nursing behavior. Fun Fact: Manatee nipples are in their arm… er… flipper pits. Ben Shaul posited that species’ milks clustered in relation to the degree of maturity at birth, maternal attentiveness, and nursing frequency, and the exposure to water and ambient temperature. Mammals that parked their infants and foraged fo

In March, Nicholas Day at SLATE wrote a column about the science of breastmilk , showcasing the emerging perspective that “Milk is food; Milk is Medicine; and Milk is Signal.” People seemed particularly intrigued by the hormonal ‘Milk is Signal’ aspect of mother’s milk, although it’s the least understood. Sidebar: Why don't more kid costumes come in adult sizes.  Seriously. Recently, Skip Bartol and colleagues coined the term “lactocrine programming” to describe the process by which hormones present in mother’s milk permanently shape physiological processes within in the young (Bartol et al. 2009). A growing body of evidence has demonstrated that hormones from the mother, ingested through milk, bind to receptors within the young. Once these “maternal-origin” hormones bind, they seemingly trigger hormonal signaling cascades as would the young’s own hormones. Previously I described that hormones present in milk-specifically adiponectin - are associated with infant growth althou