Tiroyaone Brombacher sat in her lab at the University of Cape Town watching a video of an albino mouse swimming around a meter-wide tub filled with water. The animal, which lacked an immune protein called interleukin 13 (IL-13), was searching for a place to rest but couldn't find the clear plexiglass stand that sat at one end of the pool, just beneath the waters surface. Instead, it swam and swam, crisscrossing the tub several times before finally finding the platform on which to stand. ( Her and over, in repeated trials, the mouse tailed to learn where the platform was located. Meanwhile, wildtype mice learned fairly quickly and repeatedly swam right to the platform. "When you took out IL-13,[the mice] just could not learn," says Brombacher, who studies the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and immunology.
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