Mr Tickle
06-12-02, 02:59 PM
From todays Times of Oman
It’s small and furry and doesn’t look anything like humans but the genetic blueprint of the mouse published yesterday shows there isn’t much difference between Man and Mickey.
Both have about 30,000 genes and share the bulk of them, while 90 per cent of genes linked to diseases in humans are similar to those in mice.
“We share 99 per cent of our genes with mice, and we even have the genes that could make a tail,” said Dr Jane Rogers, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.
Rogers and a consortium of scientists around the world collaborated on the genome, or complete list of coded instructions to make a mouse, which is published in the science journal Nature.
It is regarded as the most important scientific breakthrough since the sequencing of the human genome and the key to understanding human genes and how they contribute to illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, the world’s biggest killers.
Both species have around 30,000 genes, but in both cases, only about 300 of them are unique. But it is that difference that determines whether we turn out to be Homo sapiens or Mus musculus. Winding back the biological clock, they believe that mice and men share a common ancestor, an odd-looking rat-sized creature that is the mother of all placental mammals. It lived between 75 and 125 million years ago, scurrying among the dinosaurs.
Then, under evolutionary pressures, the two lineages diverged.
Gene science leapt to public prominence with the draft sequence of the human genome in 2000.
That has yielded a goldmine of data about genes, the coiled DNA strings that produce proteins — the chemicals that constitute almost everything that physically makes up a human being.
Understanding how genes work could be the clue to the next generation of super-drugs, vaccines and diagnostics, able to detect a vulnerability to an inherited disease, prevent it from occurring or reversing it.
But to reach the goal of a fix for cancer, malaria, heart disease, diabetes and other disorders is a long haul.
To get there, scientists need lab models to work on — creatures that can live easily in captivity, breed readily and have a short life span, and which do not pose the same ethical row as experimenting on human volunteers. Enter the mouse, of which there is an estimated population of 25 million in laboratories around the world. Many of them have been cloned to ensure scientific accuracy in different experiments or have had specific genes deleted or added to mimic human disorders. — AFP
It’s small and furry and doesn’t look anything like humans but the genetic blueprint of the mouse published yesterday shows there isn’t much difference between Man and Mickey.
Both have about 30,000 genes and share the bulk of them, while 90 per cent of genes linked to diseases in humans are similar to those in mice.
“We share 99 per cent of our genes with mice, and we even have the genes that could make a tail,” said Dr Jane Rogers, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.
Rogers and a consortium of scientists around the world collaborated on the genome, or complete list of coded instructions to make a mouse, which is published in the science journal Nature.
It is regarded as the most important scientific breakthrough since the sequencing of the human genome and the key to understanding human genes and how they contribute to illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, the world’s biggest killers.
Both species have around 30,000 genes, but in both cases, only about 300 of them are unique. But it is that difference that determines whether we turn out to be Homo sapiens or Mus musculus. Winding back the biological clock, they believe that mice and men share a common ancestor, an odd-looking rat-sized creature that is the mother of all placental mammals. It lived between 75 and 125 million years ago, scurrying among the dinosaurs.
Then, under evolutionary pressures, the two lineages diverged.
Gene science leapt to public prominence with the draft sequence of the human genome in 2000.
That has yielded a goldmine of data about genes, the coiled DNA strings that produce proteins — the chemicals that constitute almost everything that physically makes up a human being.
Understanding how genes work could be the clue to the next generation of super-drugs, vaccines and diagnostics, able to detect a vulnerability to an inherited disease, prevent it from occurring or reversing it.
But to reach the goal of a fix for cancer, malaria, heart disease, diabetes and other disorders is a long haul.
To get there, scientists need lab models to work on — creatures that can live easily in captivity, breed readily and have a short life span, and which do not pose the same ethical row as experimenting on human volunteers. Enter the mouse, of which there is an estimated population of 25 million in laboratories around the world. Many of them have been cloned to ensure scientific accuracy in different experiments or have had specific genes deleted or added to mimic human disorders. — AFP