Sam Falconer
Withdrawn and anxious, the mice in John Cryan’s lab were behaving like you or I might if we had experienced workplace bullying and thought we might encounter the bully again.
The good news, believe it or not, was that some of these rodents were also being fed a slurry of microbes derived from their own faeces. Unpalatable as this sounds, it had a surprisingly positive effect on their behaviour. “It was phenomenal,” says Cryan, a neurobiologist at University College Cork in Ireland. “We found that these stress-induced changes in behaviour normalised – they started to behave just like normal animals.”
