Galleria mellonella rearing manual

Freely available worldwide, the manual is designed to empower institutions internationally to adopt the wax moth larvae as a partial replacement model. This resource is designed for academic researchers, teaching labs and insect culture facilities, and was reviewed by the NC3Rs and independent external researchers before publication.

Using Galleria as a partial replacement

Galleria mellonella is an insect moth, known as the greater wax moth or honeycomb moth. Their use as a partial replacement, replacing traditional vertebrate models, has gained momentum in the past decade.

Galleria have a number of advantages over other model systems, particularly in studying infections as they are able to be maintained at 37^oC allowing experiments to be performed at the same temperature as infections in the human body.

NC3Rs-funded projects have shown that Galleria larvae can provide effective models of burn wound infection, replace mice in bacterial and fungal immune challenge studies, replace mammalian species used for modelling viral pathogenesis and even model the human gut microbiome. Recent NC3Rs-supported research has shown it is also possible to create transgenic Galleria using CRISPR/Cas9, further increasing the utility of the model as a replacement tool.

One of the barriers to the wider use of Galleria by the scientific community is the limited supply of research grade larvae and the need to establish stable colonies. For high-quality, reproducible studies, it is important to use larvae from well-characterised laboratory colonies where rearing conditions and lineage are carefully controlled. The manual from the GMRC outlines their standardised rearing protocol to address this barrier, encouraging institutions to adopt the wax moth larvae model in their own labs.