Palscience

Hundreds and thousands of medical studies have been done on mice because they share almost 85 percent of their genes with humans. A new study by University of Michigan evolutionary biologists Ben-Yang Liao and Associate Professor Jianzhi Zhang suggested that mice genes act differently in humans. They have also said that said their findings have serious implications for the use of mouse models in studying human disease.

This new finding would open the questions on the results of these thousands of medical studies. “Everyone assumes deletion of the same gene in the mouse and in humans produces the same phenotype,” said Zhang. “Our results show that may not always be the case.”

Zhang and graduate student Liao focuses on what called “essential genes“, which, through their effects on survival or fertility, are necessary for organisms to reach sexual maturity and reproduce.

“If our sample is unbiased, our results will have some important implications,” he said, noting people draw inferences about gene function by using information from other organisms. “We need to be careful doing this because … genes may have different functions or different importance in different species.”

This new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.