The great majority of how we understand human disease, and attempt to cure it, derives from mice genetically fashioned to be prolific breeders, docile and easy to handle—all qualities that have made it the favorite tool of large-scale biomedical research. However, this human-imposed selection of these behavioral and reproductive traits has come at a hefty cost. By weeding out undesirable traits in the highly standardized laboratory mouse, researchers have also placed unseen constraints on what is possible to know and learn from them.
Beth Dumont, an evolutionary biologist at The Jackson Laboratory, and colleagues are looking to remedy this situation. By collecting mice in their natural habitats, in fields, barns and forests, and in divergent ecological niches (polar, tropical, and arid climates) across North and South America, Dumont and colleagues have developed 10 new laboratory -grade research mouse strains with genomes packed with information that had been stamped out of classical mice. These new mouse strains, detailed recently in PLoS Genetics , will provide an important new resource for researchers worldwide.
Their genomes introduce millions of novel genetic variants compared to classical in-bred strains, including predicted versions of a gene that—on average—decreases the fitness of the organism carrying it, and gene-spanning structural variants, including loss of DNA, duplicated DNA, and detached chromosomes that reattach in the opposite direction—all genetic.
