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The relative importance of chickens
Chickens are useful for studying embryology |
Scientists have made the surprising discovery that the way our genes are organised has more in common with chickens than it does with mice.
It is surprising because of the way we have always viewed rodents. When we seek to understand the quirks of human genetics - such as the inheritance of disease - our first call is often a mouse "model".
If a treatment can be made to work in mice, there is every chance a similar approach can lead to a successful therapy in people.
'Wrong animal'
But David Burt and colleagues from the Roslin Institute, UK, have shown that at one level we may be looking at the wrong animal.
They have been mapping the genome - the large-scale organisation of genes - in the domestic chicken and have compared the data with maps constructed for humans and mice.
What their research shows is that the manner in which the genes are distributed across the chromosomes - the structures on which all the cell's genetic material is bundled - looks closer in humans and chickens than it does in humans and mice.
"Surprisingly, the arrangements in the human genome are more like a chicken than a mouse," says Dr Burt. "However, that's only one way of comparing two gene maps. The other is to compare the genes themselves, and when you do that we are more like mice."
Common ancestor
Although both humans and mice shared a common ancestor with chickens that lived around 300 million years ago, it seems that the rodent genome has evolved much faster, particularly over the past few tens of millions of years. In other words, mice genes have been shuffled much faster.
Chickens are not about to displace mice from their primary position in the lab, because at the business end of those mice genes there will always be more relevance to us. But at the broader level, chickens clearly have a prominent role in helping us to explain our biology.
"So much work has been done using mice, but the chicken is catching up in terms of what you can do with it as an experimental animal," says Dr Burt. "What this comparative mapping means is that you can predict what's happening in humans based on chicken maps, and vice versa."
Chickens are especially useful in the field of embryology and reproductive research, Dr Burt says.
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