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Re:Model Organisms Are Not Static by Feuilles_Mortes on Thursday May 15, 2025 @02:38PM (#43997961)
C. elegans is nice for this since you can freeze stocks in glycerol. Labs routinely go and thaw out the main wild-type reference stock if the lab stock has been around for too long.

Now I'm in a fly lab and no one's really figured a good way to freeze a fly stock down for long-term storage. So we're left to just accept some degree of background mutation and generally assume that it's not impacting our experiments too much...

Re:Model Organisms Are Not Static by skeletor_999 on Thursday May 15, 2025 @04:05PM (#43998778)
It's worth noting that we've found genetic differences between the N2 wild type strains used by different labs as well, so this is still a problem for C. elegans.
Re:Model Organisms Are Not Static by Feuilles_Mortes on Thursday May 15, 2025 @04:38PM (#43999093)
biology is hard
Re:Model Organisms Are Not Static by rolph on Thursday May 15, 2025 @05:46PM (#43999644)
no, biology is fuzzy.
Re:Model Organisms Are Not Static by taneq on Thursday May 15, 2025 @08:30PM (#44000714)
It’s like wushu. To be externally fuzzy you must be internally complex.