Articles tagged Mouse & Rat
(27 results)

  Genetic analysis of an island population of mice reveals that 19 quantitative trait loci are responsible for their impressive size. Island populations of animals, isolated from their mainland relatives, have given us insight into evolution from the very birth of the field. In fact, studying finches on the Galápagos Islands helped Charles Darwin establish…

Allelic expression in the mouse genome is surprisingly unbalanced, according to new research published in the June issue of GENETICS. The factors that determine how a gene is expressed in a given cell are complex. After all, every mammalian cell contains two copies of each gene, and both versions of that gene, called alleles, play…

In the early 1970s, a couple of hundred wild rats near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk were rounded up by scientists for an ambitious experiment to understand how animals evolve during domestication. Dimitry Belyaev and his colleagues—known for their related project on domesticating foxes—split the rats into two groups. With one group, the researchers tried to replicate…

In 1979, as the US slid into recession, researchers began systematically crossing eight distinct inbred rat strains. Their goal was to establish a genetically diverse rat colony to serve as a base for phenotype measurements and artificial selection. But the creators of the NIH rat Heterogeneous Stocks (HS) faced major challenges: “…the main one being…

Do aging males make poorer quality sperm? Older mothers face a well-established risk of producing eggs with chromosome abnormalities, but it is less clear how age affects meiosis in males. In the February issue of GENETICS, Vrooman et al. investigated chromosome dynamics during spermatogenesis in mice of different ages. They found that meiotic errors increased…