A team of international scientists have announced that it has sequenced the mouse genome. The results of the publicly-funded project will be of benefit to scientists studying the human genome as, to quote one of the scientists involved, Dr Tim Hubbard of the UK's Sanger Centre, the mouse is 'a key model organism for humans'.
Hubbard continued, in an interview for BBC News Online, that the human and mouse genomes 'are so similar that you can just compare the two directly. If there are mouse genes we know something about, we can now find genes that look the same in humans.'
The mouse genome had been sequenced before, but it was not made freely available to scientists. The international team - the Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium (MGSC) - which was part funded by the American National Institutes of Health and the UK's Wellcome Trust - has posted its sequence on the Internet with free access for all. More work will be done to improve it, but research can now begin using the information provided so far.
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