Originally posted by Earth Angel
An expert on the "THIS MORNING PROGRAM" uk WHICH IS ALWAYS A VERY RELIABLE SOURCE.
If you go into thier website there should be information regarding this. Not many people are aware of this fact apparently but none the less.
Yes mice are 99% the genetics of humans, why do you think the poor buggers are experimented on such as growing human ears on them. Because it is the
closest thing to a human ear you will get that a human will not reject!
Sorry - irrespective of the historical veracity of your morning news show with respect to scientific manners, what you're saying isn't exactly true.
Mice and humans are roughly 85% homologous at the sequence level with respect to coding genes. The actual calculated values vary from 70 - 90%. This
says that in the CODING regions of the mice and human genomes, about 15% on the average will be different.
Now what this expert might have said is that we share 99% of our genes with mice. That could be true, I don't know that for sure, and am feeling to
lazy to look it up. Believe it or not those are completely different statements though. The latter says that 99% of the genes present in humans are
present in mice - but the differences between homolgous genes between mice and humans is still ~15% of the nucleotides. That is to say if Gene X is
present in both humans and mice, and the gene is 100 nucleotides in length, 85 would be the same between mice and humans, not 99.
Mice are popular experimental animals for a number of reasons including but not limited to: being cheap, readily available, established laboratory
animals, with short reproductive times, low maintenance demands, that serve as a good model organism for several diseases, and have a wide variety of
established protocols associated with them. In particular, protocols for "knocking-out" and somewhat less so "Knocking-in" genes to the mouse
genome are readily established, making them very attractive for genetics studies. Why spend millions on research with primates, for which there are
significantly fewer protocols, etc. and orders of magnitude more hassles, when you can spend thousands on research with rodents, which are incredibly
easy to work with?