5-Animals: Scientists map mouse genome

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TITLE:  Scientists Map Mouse Genome
SOURCE: Associated Press, by Andrew Bridges
        http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020804/
        ap_on_sc/mouse_genome_1
DATE:   Aug 4, 2002

------------------ archive: http://www.gene.ch/genet.html ------------------


Scientists Map Mouse Genome

An international team has completed the most comprehensive map ever of the 
genetic code of the mouse, an accomplishment that will make the laboratory 
animal more useful to scientists studying human health and disease. The map 
covers an estimated 98 percent of the order of the nearly 3 billion letters 
that make up the mouse code, or genome. Two efforts have nearly completed 
the deciphering of those letters, and the map will serve as an atlas of the 
genome and allow scientists to zero in on regions of interest. It will also 
permit scientists to fill in gaps that remain in the deciphering efforts, 
which remain in draft form. Details are to appear Monday in the online 
edition of the journal Nature. The map is available for public review on 
the Internet.

Humans and mice last shared a common ancestor - probably a small rodentlike 
mammal - roughly 100 million years ago, but today retain similar-sized 
genomes and many of the same genes. That makes mice ideal stand-ins for 
humans in genetic studies. The function of many human genes, much less the 
role they play in disease, is unknown. Creating so-called "knockout mice" - 
animals whose genetic code has been altered in the lab to either turn on or 
off certain genes that mice and humans share - allows scientists to 
understand the purpose of those genes and their role in disease, as well as 
test therapeutic drugs.

"Now that we have the human sequence, it's trying to interpret what's 
actually contained in it. A lot of genes in the human we don't have a 
function for them. If we are able to map them in a model organism like the 
mouse, we can derive their function by knocking them out," said study co-
author Simon Gregory of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, 
England. The team also included scientists from various research institutes 
and universities in Canada and the United States.

The map will allow scientists to work on genes in the laboratory that have 
already been identified by computer analysis of the draft sequence data, 
said Carol Bult, an associate staff scientist with the Jackson Laboratory 
in Bar Harbor, Maine. "The genomic sequence is extremely valuable as a 
substrate for doing computational methods of gene discovery - having the 
sequence really speeds up your ability to identify genes and other 
interesting features. However, once they are identified, you need to jump 
to a different kind of resource to do biology," said Bult, who is not 
associated with the study.

On the Net: Map of mouse genome at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/guide/mouse



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