Ferret genome sequenced, holds clues to respiratory diseases

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

17-Nov-2014

Contact: Michael McCarthy leilag@uw.edu 206-543-3620 University of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine

In what is likely to be a major step forward in the study of influenza, cystic fibrosis and other human diseases, an international research effort has a draft sequence of the ferret genome. The sequence was then used to analyze how the flu and cystic fibrosis affect respiratory tissues at the cellular level.

The National Institute of Allergy and infectious Diseases, of the National Institutes of Health, funded the project that was coordinated by Michael Katze and Xinxia Peng at the University of Washington in Seattle and Federica Di Palma and Jessica Alfoldi at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

"The sequencing of the ferret genome is a big deal," said Michael Katze, UW professor of microbiology who led the research effort. "Every time you sequence a genome, it allows you to answer a wide range of questions you couldn't before. Having the genome changes a field forever."

Ferrets have long been considered the best animal model for studying a number of human diseases, particularly influenza, because the strains that infect humans also infect ferrets. These infections spread from ferret to ferret much as they do from human to human.

In the study, scientists at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, led by Federica Di Palma and Jessica Alfoldi, first sequenced and annotated the genome of a domestic sable ferret, Mustela putorius furo. They then collaborated with the Katze group on the subsequent analysis. A technique called transcriptome analysis. This technique identifies all the RNA that is being produced, or transcribed, from areas of the genome that are being activated at a given point in time. This makes it possible to see how the ferret cells are responding when challenged by influenza and in cystic fibrosis.

"By creating a high quality genome and transcriptome resource for the ferret, we have demonstrated how studies in non-conventional model organisms can facilitate essential bioscience research underpinning health," said Federica Di Palma, director of science in Vertebrate & Health Genomics at TGAC, The Genome Analysis Centre.

In the influenza portion of the study, Yoshihiro Kawaoka's group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison exposed ferrets to a reconstructed version of the virus that caused the deadly pandemic flu of 1918, the so-called Spanish flu, which killed 25 million people worldwide, and the swine-flu virus that caused the worldwide pandemic of 2009-2010 and continues to cause disease today.

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Ferret genome sequenced, holds clues to respiratory diseases