How the Mouse Genome Stacks Up sciencenow.sciencemag.org
[ Somewhat less breathlessly . . . ]
Three groups compared mouse DNA to human chromosome 21, which is completely finished and thoroughly analyzed. Two of these teams--one led by Marie-Laure Yaspo of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and the other by Andrea Ballabio of the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine in Naples, Italy--found the genes common to both species and then studied the expression of those genes in developing mice and in a variety of tissues. In another project, Stylianos Antonarakis and Emmanouil Dermitzakis of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, uncovered other long stretches of DNA outside genes that, because they are conserved through evolution, are likely to be important, perhaps as regulators of genes.
In addition, a team from Japan's Institute for Chemical and Physical Research (RIKEN) released almost 61,000 sequences, called full-length cDNAs, derived from mouse RNA and representing blueprints for proteins. It turns out the number of cDNAs proved to be more than the number of genes, indicating that some genes are put together in various ways as they are expressed, says project leader Yoshihide Hayashizaki.
Mouse researchers have their work cut out for them and are continuing to interpret the wealth of new data. But all in all, says Karen Artzt, a geneticist at the University of Texas, Austin, “the data are turning out to be as valuable as we hoped.” |
