What potential effect does high mortality in newborn mice due to MHV have on research?

High mortality in newborn mice due to Mouse Hepatitis Virus (MHV) can significantly impact the reliability of experimental data. When a large number of newborn mice die in a study, it can lead to a loss of important data points that researchers need to draw valid conclusions. This high mortality can skew the results and potentially invalidate the outcomes of experiments, as the sample size may be reduced, and the characteristics of the surviving subjects might not represent the overall population intended for the research.

The integrity of research findings relies heavily on the consistency and health of the subjects used in experiments. Therefore, when MHV causes high mortality rates, any extrapolated data or conclusions derived from the affected population could be misleading, ultimately affecting the reliability and interpretability of the experimental results. This scenario can compromise the study's objectives and lead to challenges in reproducibility, which is a key tenet of scientific research.

The other options, while they may touch on different aspects of research management or funding, do not directly speak to the immediate concern of data reliability, which is critically affected by high mortality due to viral infections like MHV.