The age and sex of studied animals profoundly impact experimental outcomes in biomedical research. However, most preclinical studies in mice use a wide-spanning age range from 4 to 20 weeks and do not assess male and female mice in parallel.
Here, we employed an optimized quantitative proteomics workflow in order to deeply profile mouse paw skin and sciatic nerves SCN — two tissues implicated in nociception and pain as well as diseases linked to inflammation, injury, and demyelination. Remarkably, we uncovered significant differences when comparing male and female mice at adolescent 4 weeks and adult 14 weeks age.
Taken together, our study uncovers hitherto unknown sex and age differences at the level of proteins and protein networks. Overall, we provide a unique proteome resource that facilitates mechanistic insights into somatosensory and skin biology, and integrates age and sex as biological variables — a prerequisite for successful preclinical studies in mouse disease models.
This study sheds light on the importance of appropriate experimental design for mouse disease models which has been overlooked so far. The authors provide solid evidence for dynamic changes of proteomes in mouse tissues according to age and sex.
This type of work is extremely valuable to many biomedical scientists in the field for conducting reproducible research, especially in preclinical studies. In mice, the first 12 weeks of life are characterized by pronounced changes in terms of growth and development of all organs and systems. Similarly, the sex of mice needs to be considered when comparing experimental outcomes. A prominent example of the enormous diversity of age ranges in publications are studies on rodent mainly mice and rats skin and peripheral sensory neurons e.
