Mouse Genetic Code Published

linuxwrangler writes "Scientists in six countries have published a nearly-complete genetic code of the mouse. Results show striking similarities between human and mouse DNA and scientists are now working on side-beside mapping of the two genomes."

Comments

Re:DNA is nice and all

[Otter]

Note, though, that microRNAs and other noncoding RNAs are encoded by genes in DNA, just like the more familiar genes whose RNAs are translated to protein. That's perhaps part of the reason why humans seem to have a surprisingly low number of genes -- microRNAs were recently discovered and there may be many more such families that existing methods don't recognize as genes.

Presumably such families, being important, would be similar between the human and mouse genome and much of the analysis of those similarities involves looking exactly for that.

Actually, side by side mapping is finished

[MikeJ9919]

Side by side mapping for the most recent build of the mouse genome (alignment dated in August 2002) is finished. It's only the question of analysis that's now important. The article in Nature (I'm one of the co-authors) explores a variety of different methods for explaining the differences between the human and the mouse genomes, and (hopefully) for eventually explaining (or at least predicting) the process of evolution at the genetic level. It's hard to explain how massive this project was...a lot of the information was spun of into papers in other journals simply because Nature couldn't fit it all.