Mice
The official name of mice when used for testing by geneticists.
What is Mus musculus2?
The official name of roundworms when used by geneticists.
What is cenorhabditis elegans2?
The official name that fruit flies go by when used by geneticists.
What is Drosophila Melanogaster2?
The official name of zebrafish used by geneticists.
What is danio rerio2?
Non-human species that are extensively studied in order to understand a range of biological phenomena2.
What are model organisms?
A mouse that has had genes altered so they are inactive or removed3.
What is a knockout mouse?
The first genome sequence of a multi-cellular organism occurred with roundworms in 19985.
What standard genomic practice was pioneered in C. elegans?
A list of all the collect fruit fly collections, useful for undergraduate students and research professionals2.
What is FlyBase?
They have transparent embryos, which allows for the study of development from the earliest stages4.
What is the reason zebrafish have been utilized for genetic studies?
The large-scale genomic sequencing that allowed for the term "model organism" to be officially adopted in the 1990's.2
What is the Human Genome Project?
The Trp53 tumor suppressor gene is disabled, which makes it highly susceptible to various cancers, specifically human Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a form of familial breast cancer3.
What is the p53 knockout mice strand?
The process of apoptosis can be clearly seen in roundworms through the use of Nomarski optics, which allows researchers to see how an organisms utilizes cell death pathways5.
What is the reason that roundworms are used to study apoptosis?
Using this approach, essentially any gene or allele that causes disease in humans can be studied in flies6.
What is CRISPR?
They have a fully sequenced genome which can be easily manipulated, along with a short generation time and complete organ systems are formed shortly after fertilization4.
What are the advantages of using zebrafish as model's for human diseases?
These countries in the HGP focused a lot of their funding specifically on model organisms2.
What are the German, French, and Japanese arms of the HGP?
They are often used to study immune, endocrine, nervous, cardiovascular, skeletal and other complex physiological systems that mammals share3.
What systems are mice best used to study?
They have a development cycle that is highly determinant; both embryonically and post-embryonically, the cells divide at predictable times and follow precise and nearly invariant lineages5.
What is a key biological reason for working with roundworms?
They followed the discovery of other Nobel Prize winning research using flies, and are known as a set of specialized chromosomes that prevent recombination through a series of DNA inversions6.
What are balancer chromosomes?
They are useful for studying type 2 diabetes due to the similarity in their processes for energy homeostasis and metabolism, including but not limited to appetite and insulin regulation4.
What is an example of a human metabolic disease modeled in zebrafish?
A gene that has been found in many model organisms, such as roundworms, and in humans. An example is BRCA1, which is associated with human breast cancer2.
What is a homologous gene?
They can develop cancer, Huntington's disease, diabetes, blindness, and many more things naturally3.
What diseases are mice prone to?
It augments the mutational screens held by individual laboratories, and complements the deletion strains engineered and maintained by other labs. The combined power of whole-genome sequencing and forward genetics resulted in a 2007 strain “library” of genetic mutant animals with an average of over 400 homozygous mutations per strain5.
What is the Million Mutation Project?
The CREB (cAMP-responsive-element-binding protein), which regulates the expression of various genes in many cells, including neurons, which has a crucial role in enhancing long-term memory1.
What was one major discovery that was made with fruit flies?
The current understanding of the mechanism behind haemochromatosis, or iron overload, came from a team that used positional cloning to identify the gene, the mutation of which leads to excessive iron uptake during digestion in the zebrafish1.
What is the first time a zebrafish was used to predict a human disease?
The immunomodulator TGN1412, was meant to be used to treat autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis. There were six men left fighting for their lives in the UK when it went to clinical trial, as the model organisms that were used to test this drug did not properly represent human T cells, and the individuals that volunteered to try the experiment suffered severe tissue damage1.
Why was the immunomodulator TGN1412 withdrawn from development?