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Mentors: McKenna Burns, Ph.D., Mike Hughes, Ph.D., Paul Schaeffer, Ph.D.

Maintaining body temperature is a core homeostatic function. The left ventricles in winter mice and voles enlarge, potentially occurring due to the increased workload of the heart in circulating warmth and nutrients to the rest of the body. This enlargement, called cardiac hypertrophy, is caused by physiological, healthy factors such as exercise and pregnancy or by pathological, disease-state factors such as obesity and hypertension. Our lab is establishing cold-exposure as a model system for studying cardiac hypertrophy and it is necessary to investigate how well mice maintain body temperatures when exposed to ecologically relevant temperatures. We measured internal body temperature of laboratory mice exposed to either control or room temperatures across 14 days to analyze the differences. It was determined that mice were able to maintain their body temperature in the cold condition, causing additional stress to the heart that led to cardiac hypertrophy.