Ferret genome clue to flu and cystic fibrosis

A ground-breaking study involving The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) in Norwich is likely to be a major first step forward in the study of influenza, cystic fibrosis and other human disease such as heart conditions and diabetes.

The study reveals clues found by scientists in the ferret genome regarding how the respiratory system responds to pandemic flu and cystic fibrosis and was published in the online advanced publication of leading science journal Nature Biotechnology.

The international research effort has been funded by the National Institute of Allergy and infectious Diseases (NIAID) coordinated by Michael Katze and Xinxia Peng at the University of Washington in Seattle and Federica Di Palma at The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), formally at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The researchers sequenced the ferret genome and used the data to analyse how influenza and cystic fibrosis affected respiratory tissues at the cellular level.

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 (Vertebrate & Health Genomics) at TGAC.

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 and spread from ferret to ferret much as 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, and then collaborated with the Katze group on the subsequent analysis.

A technique called transcriptome analysis was used to reveal which genes were being turned on, or expressed, in ferret tissues when challenged by influenza and in a knock out model of cystic fibrosis.

This 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 couldnt before. Having the genome changes a field forever.

In the influenza portion of the study, Yoshihiro Kawaokas 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 so-called swine flu virus that caused the worldwide pandemic of 2009-2010 and continues to cause disease today.

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Ferret genome clue to flu and cystic fibrosis