Question: what is the best animal to do chemicals stuff with??

Martha Havenith answered on 21 Jun 2015:

Oh that’s a difficult one. It really depends on what your research question is. Of course most chemical experiments you wouldn’t need any animals for, but let’s say you want to know how a chemical affects the body somehow. Do you just want to know if it does anything to any live body cells? Then you don’t even need an animal. There are lots of cells that you can grow in the lab that were taken from, say, the skin of a mouse long ago but are now just kept growing in labs. If you keep the cells clean of bacteria, they can keep growing and multiplying on their own.
Would you need to know how an animal reacts to a chemical in a normal environment? For example if it would start moving differently? In such a case you would probably go for a small animal like a mouse. In some very rare cases when you need to know exactly what a chemical would do to a human (e.g. does this chemical change your mood?), you might even need to test it in an animal that is more similar to humans, like a monkey. Let me know if I’m missing your question though – chemicals are a big field so maybe you meant something else?