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SCIENCE
The publicly available DNA sequence of a female mouse from the strain C57BL/6J is sure to trigger an avalanche of new research. "The mouse genome is a Rosetta stone that will allow us to understand the human genome," says Eric S. Lander, a consortium member and director of the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genomic Research. The 2.5 billion-base-pair mouse genome contains only about 30,000 genes that code for proteins, roughly the same surprisingly low number found in the human genome. Nearly all of these genes have a match in humans. Several other international scientific teams have conducted analyses of the sequence. One has created a library of the sequences of transcribed regions that will make it easier to make "knockout" mice that lack a single gene [Nature, 420, 563 (2002)]. Another has identified single-nucleotide sequence differences between this and other mouse strains, which promises to speed up the discovery of genes responsible for disease [Nature, 420, 574 (2002)]. Still another has shown that most of the DNA that doesn't code for protein is shared by both mice and humans--suggesting that these regions are crucial for gene regulation in ways not yet understood [Nature, 420, 578 (2002)]. Publication of the mouse sequence follows the Nov. 25 public release of a preliminary sequence of the genome of another model mammal, the rat. Genomic comparisons between human and mouse are incredibly powerful, Lander notes. "But being able to compare the human, mouse, and rat genomes will be even more interesting," he says. |
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