New view of mouse genome finds many similarities, striking differences with human genome

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

19-Nov-2014

Contact: Steven Benowitz steven.benowitz@gmail.com 301-451-8325 NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute @genome_gov

Looking across evolutionary time and the genomic landscapes of humans and mice, an international group of researchers has found powerful clues to why certain processes and systems in the mouse - such as the immune system, metabolism and stress response - are so different from those in people. Building on years of mouse and gene regulation studies, they have developed a resource that can help scientists better understand how similarities and differences between mice and humans are written in their genomes.

Their findings - reported by the mouse ENCODE Consortium online Nov. 19, 2014 (and in print Nov. 20) in four papers in Nature and in several other publications - examine the genetic and biochemical programs involved in regulating mouse and human genomes. The scientists found that, in general, the systems that are used to control gene activity have many similarities in mice and humans, and have been conserved, or continued, through evolutionary time.

The results may offer insights into gene regulation and other systems important to mammalian biology. They also provide new information to determine when the mouse is an appropriate model to study human biology and disease, and may help to explain some of its limitations.

The latest research results are from the mouse ENCODE project, which is part of the ENCODE, or ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements, program supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health. ENCODE is building a comprehensive catalog of functional elements in the human and mouse genomes. Such elements include genes that provide instructions to build proteins, non-protein-coding genes and regulatory elements that control which genes are turned on or off, and when.

"The mouse has long been a mainstay of biological research models," said NHGRI Director Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D. "These results provide a wealth of information about how the mouse genome works, and a foundation on which scientists can build to further understand both mouse and human biology. The collection of mouse ENCODE data is a tremendously useful resource for the research community."

"This is the first systematic comparison of the mouse and human at the genomic level," said Bing Ren, Ph.D., co-senior author on the Consortium's main Nature study and professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego. "We have known that the mouse was mostly a good model for humans. We found that many processes and pathways are conserved from mouse to human. This allows us to study human disease by studying those aspects of mouse biology that reflect human biology."

In many cases, the investigators found that some DNA sequence differences linked to diseases in humans appeared to have counterparts in the mouse genome. They also showed that certain genes and elements are similar in both species, providing a basis to use the mouse to study relevant human disease. However, they also uncovered many DNA variations and gene expression patterns that are not shared, potentially limiting the mouse's use as a disease model. Mice and humans share approximately 70 percent of the same protein-coding gene sequences, which is just 1.5 percent of these genomes.

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New view of mouse genome finds many similarities, striking differences with human genome