"As scientists use this resource to find ways to prevent and treat the genetic changes that cause cancer, heart disease, and a host of other ailments, the diversity of our lab experiments should be much easier to translate to humans," he noted.
Churchill and Pardo-Manuel de Villena have been working for almost a decade with collaborators around the world to expand the genetic diversity of the laboratory mouse. In 2004 they launched the Collaborative Cross, a project to interbreed eight different strains--five of the classic inbred strains and three wild-derived strains. In 2009 Churchill's lab started the Diversity Outbred mouse population with breeding stock selected from the Collaborative Cross project.
The research team estimates that the standard laboratory mouse strains carry about 12 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), single-letter variations in the A, C, G or T bases of DNA. The Collaborative Cross mice deliver a whopping 45 million SNPs, as much as four times the genetic variation in the human population. "All these variants give us a lot more handles into understanding the genome," Churchill says.
"This work creates a remarkable foundation for understanding the genetics of the laboratory mouse, a critical model for studying human health," said James Anderson, Ph.D., who oversees bioinformatics grants at the National Institutes of Health. "Knowledge of the ancestry of the many strains of this invaluable model vertebrate will not only inform future experimentation but will allow
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| Contact: Joyce Peterson joyce.peterson@jax.org 207-288-6058 Jackson Laboratory Source:Eurekalert |