BOSTON -- They may not look a lot like us, but the mouse is very similar to you and me. Now, scientists know just how similar.
A study published in Thursday's issue of the journal
Nature said that researchers in six countries have mapped out the genome of the laboratory mouse.
The mouse genome is 2.5 billion DNA letters long, about 14 percent shorter than the human genome. But more than 90 percent of the sequences in the rodent lineup somewhere within the human sequence -- including genes that cause mice to have tails. The similarities will help researchers test potential treatments for a range of illnesses.
"Having the sequence of the mouse genome is like looking ourselves in a mirror," said Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Mass. "We might think of ourselves as different than a mouse because we're so much bigger and so much smarter, but look inside, the organs are all the same."
The scientists, who first sequenced the human genome, said the findings on the tiny beings have huge implications in the field of medicine. The location of each gene will give researchers new clues into the causes for human disease from Alzheimer's disease to asthma.
"If there is a glitch in that gene in a human somewhere that causes some disease, a similar glitch in the mouse is likely to create a similar problem, which is much easier to study, of course, in the laboratory," National Human Genome Institute spokesman Francis Collins said.
"This is not going to result in a cure for cancer tomorrow, but it gets us a step closer, a significant step closer than we were before," Lander said.
There are a few things that the maps show mice are better designed to do -- reproduce, fight disease, and they have a keen sense of smell. These are differences scientists can now see by comparing the gene sequences on a computer -- with the simple click of a mouse.
"The human and mouse genome sequences can be viewed as two decks of cards obtained by reshuffling from a master deck--an ancestral mammalian genome," said study collaborator Pavel Pevzner, a professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. "And in addition to the major rearrangements that shuffle large chunks of the gene pool, our research confirmed another process that shuffles only small chunks."
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