ABSTRACT
The origin of the laboratory mouse lies in pet mice bred by mouse fanciers in Europe throughout the 1800s. Clinical chemistry capabilities applicable to laboratory mice have expanded recently from about 20 tests on serum, plasma, and urine, to hundreds of biomarkers that can be quantified in increasingly smaller specimen sample sizes. Certainly, these assays will increase in significance and utility in the foreseeable future. This chapter provides information and resources regarding the more traditional bioanalytes assessed in the laboratory mouse. Lipid metabolism in laboratory mice has some significant differences compared to that of humans. In contrast to humans, laboratory mice carry most of their cholesterol as high-density lipoproteins (HDL), and lack cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP), which in other species (e.g., humans), is responsible for exchange of triglycerides for cholesteryl esters from very-low-density lipoproteins (VLDL) and low-density lipoproteins (LDL) to HDL, and vice versa.
