Laboratory animals display similar behaviour to wild animals but are much calmer and less aggressive.Gritty rats and mice living in sewers and farms seem to have healthier immune systems than their squeaky clean cousins that frolic in cushy antiseptic labs, two studies indicate. While house mice in the wild grow to between seven to eleven centimetres in length and weigh 20 to 25 grams, the size and weight of laboratory mice vary considerably depending on the strain. The wild forms usually have a brown coat, whereas albino laboratory strains have white fur and other strains have black fur. Wild mice and laboratory mice differ in appearance, especially in coat colour. Some scientists consider the differences between wild and laboratory mice to be so great that the laboratory animals should be classified as a separate species dubbed Mus laboratorius. Bred for genetic uniformity, it is less varied genetically than its wild counterparts, and its gene pool contains only a single version of most genes. The laboratory mouse is a hybrid: its genome is a mosaic of all three subspecies. A third subspecies, Mus musculus casteaneous, is native to Southeast Asia. The two subspecies can still cross-breed, but their offspring are less fertile. The eastern house mouse ( Mus musculus musculus) occurs east of the dividing line through Europe as far as Japan. It also occurs in Africa, America and Australia.
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The species can be divided into three subspecies, two of which live in Europe: the Western house mouse ( Mus musculus domesticus) lives west of a line that runs through eastern Germany, Bavaria, western Austria and the Balkans to the Black Sea. The laboratory mice used in science are all descendants of the house mouse, Mus musculus. From the house mouse to the laboratory mouse A number of scientific breakthroughs in cancer research, which would not have been possible without the mouse, have been honoured with Nobel Prizes. Pioneering discoveries in the field of immunobiology, such as the role of antibodies in fending off pathogens and the principle of immunotolerance to the body’s own tissues, would have been inconceivable without the small rodents. Initially, the focus was on the study of cancer, but the mouse is now used as a model by scientists of almost all biological disciplines. Today, the mouse is by far the most common research mammal in the world. These genes are distributed on 40 chromosomes in mice, compared to 46 chromosomes in humans. We now know that the mouse has around 24,000 genes − about the same number as humans. Subsequently, scientists learned more and more about the genome of the mouse: from the order of genes on individual chromosomes to the sequencing of the mouse genome in 2002. In 1929 the Jackson Laboratory was founded in the United States to study the genetics of mammals and cancer. The animals from this inbred line were homogeneous, so that the results of scientific investigations would no longer be distorted by genetic differences. A breakthrough was achieved in 1909 when researchers managed for the first time to mate mice with each other over many generations. The offspring had the characteristics of their parents, meaning that their susceptibility to cancer was apparently inherited.įor this research, the scientists therefore required mice with a genetic makeup that was as consistent as possible. They found that they could only transmit cancer to mice that had a specific mutation but not to animals lacking the mutation.
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In the early 20th century, researchers mainly used mice to study cancer. The laboratory mouse - a life for research During the 19th century, an increasing number of scientists became curious about the genetic variability of mice and began to investigate the underlying reasons, applying the hereditary rules discovered by Georg Mendel to a mammal for the first time. They bred animals with different eye and coat colours and traded their small charges among themselves. This triumph is due above all to the development of farming, and animal and plant breeding, which opened up new habitats for the small rodents.Īfter being hunted as pests and competitors for food for thousands of years, mice attracted the attention of private fanciers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Native to the Indian subcontinent, the mouse simply accompanied humans on their migrations, conquering every continent in the process.
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Few species have benefited from humans as much as the house mouse, Mus musculus. This pretty well summarizes the millennia-old relationship between man and mouse.