Laboratory of Gnotobiology
Sinkora lab
The Laboratory of Gnotobiology is a top scientific workplace breeding germ-free animals. The laboratory was founded in the 1960s as a detached workplace of the Institute of Microbiology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, by prof. Jaroslav Šterzl in Nový Hrádek in Orlické hory. Currently, laboratory teams use two preclinical germ-free animal models in their experiments: mice and pigs. These allow them to study the influence of intestinal bacteria and defined microbiota components on the physiological and immune response development in human disease experimental models. Mice are bred in germ-free conditions for a long time and are currently a key model for determining the causal relationship between changes in the microbiome and the development of diseases. Pigs, unlike mice or humans, have a special placentation that does not allow maternal immune cells and antibodies passage, and germ-free piglets are thus an ideal model for studying the ontogeny of the immune response.
