Man and mouse genetically similar: Comparing DNA sequences offers insight into man’s makeup

[Guest guest]

> They are very often not at all coincident with results on humans.

>

> Resulting in ever greater human suffering than that of the animals.

>

> Penicillin is just one of more than thousands of examples of the counter

> productivity of animal tests. Because it kills guinea pigs, its animal

> experiments held up its introduction 10-20 years.. resulting in

> millions

> of human deaths..

 

Jay,

 

We have come a long way from the days of penicillin and excessive animal

testing. As far as your similarity claim, perhaps you are not up on the

latest research. See the article below.

 

Love,

 

Ryan

 

Man and mouse genetically similar

Comparing DNA sequences offers insight into man’s makeup

By Maggie Fox

Reuters

 

WASHINGTON, May 30 — What makes a man different from a mouse?

Genetically, it is pretty hard to tell, researchers said Thursday. An

initial comparison of one mouse chromosome to a human chromosome shows

the genes they carry are highly similar, a team at genome company Celera

Genomics reports in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

 

SCIENTISTS HOPE that by comparing human DNA sequences to those of other

animals, they can tease out what it is that makes us unique.

And because scientists have experimented on billions of lab mice

and know a great deal about their genetics, they hope the field, called

comparative genomics, can help them better understand human biology.

Richard Mural and a team of colleagues at Celera compared

chromosome 16 in the mouse to human chromosome 21, which it closely

resembles. Mural said both are fairly small and well-understood, which

is why his team compared them.

“To me, the thing that I found the most interesting is just how

similar the mouse and the human are in respect to genes, and gene

content and DNA sequences,” Neal Copeland, an expert in genetics and

genomics at the National Cancer Institute, said in a telephone interview.

“We already knew that human and mouse were similar but it was

really hard to know exactly how similar.”

The Celera researchers found mice have about 10 percent less DNA

than humans, mostly because the human genome has a great deal of

repetitive sequences, once called “junk DNA.”

This surprised Copeland. “It always has been assumed that the

mouse and human genomes were about the same size.”

Celera is sequencing the entire collection of mouse genes. It is

also finishing the human sequence, which it assembled in 2000. A

publicly funded effort to sequence and analyze the entire mouse genome

in also underway.

 

GENOME MYSTERY

One of the mysteries raised by sequencing the human genome is how

few genes it takes to make a person. Scientists once thought humans had

about 100,000 different genes, but Celera and the publicly funded Human

Genome Project came up with about one-third that number.

In contrast, the rice plant has 50,000 genes.

“The amount of DNA in an organism just doesn’t seem to have any

correlation with anything we associate with the complexity of an

organism,” Mural said in a telephone interview. “There are plants that

have genomes 10 times larger than humans.”

Scientists now believe that the genes themselves are not the only

important parts of the genome. Other DNA, including the repetitive

sequences, may play a key role in controlling genes.

Celera is publishing the information on chromosome 16 in the

public GenBank, but holding back the rest of the mouse genome data for

paying clients. They found what look like 731 genes on the mouse

chromosome.

“Fourteen genes have no known human homologs (counterparts),

whereas 21 human genes in the compared regions are unique to humans,”

Copeland and colleagues Nancy Jenkins and Stephen O’Brien at the

National Cancer Institute, said in a commentary.

The 14 genes may be unique to mice, or their human counterparts

may lie elsewhere, Mural’s team said.

 

DIFFERENT EVOLUTION

Based on this, it could be predicted that about 2 percent of

mouse genes are unique to mice, and about 2.9 percent are unique to

humans, Mural’s team added.

One big difference lies in genes that control production of

structures known as zinc fingers. Zinc fingers play a huge role in

regulating what genes do, so this is probably key to the process of mice

and humans having evolved into different species, Copeland said.

Humans share 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, our

closest living relatives. Humans and chimps branched off from a common

ape-like ancestor 5 million years ago, while humans and mice diverged

between 90 million and 100 million years ago.

Mural said it is too soon to say what percentage of DNA is shared

by mice and men.

 

© 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or

redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the

prior written consent of Reuters.

 

http://www.msnbc.com/news/759540.asp?cp1=1

 

On Sunday, August 4, 2002, at 12:37 AM, Jay Gleason wrote:

 

> Ryan

> Many on this list are not big on animal tests..

>

> They always involve animals.. often in horrible ways.

>

> They are very often not at all coincident with results on humans.

>

> Resulting in ever greater human suffering than that of the animals.

>

> Penicillin is just one of more than thousands of examples of the counter

> productivity of animal tests. Because it kills guinea pigs, its animal

> experiments held up its introduction 10-20 years.. resulting in

> millions

> of human deaths..

>

> I and many believe the facts show that the only real reason for animal

> testing is that it is a cash cow for the research industry.

>

> And that it does far more harm than good even only looking at its human

> cost.

>

> There are better ways of getting more accurate results. (Some we may

> have

> to look for)

> And in the future we will be looked on as being in the dark ages for not

> having seen this.

>

> (Dieticians are esp. subject to not understanding this.)

>

>

> Ryan Darius Partovi [rpartovi]

> Saturday, August 03, 2002 9:15 PM

>

> Re: [sFBAVeg] Chocolate Milk

>

>

> Almond Breeze contains carageenan, making it a no-no in my book Avoid

> guar gum, carageenan, and large amounts of pectin. In cecal contents of

> conventional rats, both guar gum and pectin led to the appearance of

> cadaverine and to elevated putrescine concentrations in comparison with

> the fiber-free control diet The cecal cadaverine concentration was

> higher in pectin- than in guar-fed These experiments demonstrated the

> ability of bacteroides, fusobacteria and anaerobic cocci to synthesize

> high amounts of putrescine and spermidine. Calculations based on these

> results suggest that the intestinal microflora are a major source of

> polyamines in the contents of the large intestine.

>

> Love,

>

> Ryan