A recently completed DNA sequencing of the 15 mouse strains most commonly used in biomedical research showed that there were more than 8.3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in their genomes. These data will help researchers understand and possibly identify potential therapeutic targets in variety of diseases such as Parkinson's, cancer, diabetes, heart and lung diseases, reproductive diseases, and asthma and other childhood diseases, which are affected by exposure to environmental substances.

Now, we can go to our computer, click on the mouse strain we want to use, see the sequence variations for that strain and compare it to the others," said David Threadgill, Ph.D., an expert in mouse models of disease at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "If we use multiple strains, we can then look at the data after the animals are exposed to an environmental substance and compare the genetic differences between the strains that acquired a disease and those that did not. This will help us begin to identify causes of differential susceptibility to disease."

"These mouse data will aid in our understanding of 'counterpart' genes in humans, the corresponding molecular and biological pathways the lead to disease susceptibility, and the environmental agents that trigger the development of disease in susceptible people," said David Christiani, M.D., Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Occupational Medicine and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. "The data will also be a great resource for pharmaceutical companies that are developing new treatments for disease."

The data are publicly available on the National Center for Biotechnology Information website. For more information on the use of mouse models in biomedical research, see the Center of Rodent Genetics, which was responsible for overseeing the abovementioned Resequencing and SNP Discovery Project.