Word: mice
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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CHICAGO: Scientists have located the gene that governs the body's inner clock -- at least in mice. Resarchers, according to the journal Cell, believe that the discovery of the so-called "clock gene" in laboratory mice, with its 100,000 bits of information on sleep patterns, mood swings and hormone levels, is an important step towards isolating a parallel gene in humans. This could allow scientists to zero in on the causes of diseases such as insomnia and depression that are related to disturbances in circadian rhythms. It may also help explain why medical conditions such as asthma and heart...
From the outside, the new strain of mice looked a little, well, lumpy. But when scientists peeled back their fur and skin, what had seemed like extra baggage in the shoulders and hips turned out to be pure muscle--two to three times the muscle mass of the average pip-squeak rodent. These were not your ordinary genetically engineered laboratory mice; these were Mighty Mice...
...Johns Hopkins School of Medicine didn't set out to create muscle-bound lab specimens. As reported in last week's Nature, they wanted to find out how a particular protein, a growth factor called myostatin, regulates the development of tissue. So they produced a strain of mice in which the gene that codes for myostatin had been deleted, or "knocked out." The resulting mutant animals grew up normal in every way--except for their extraordinarily well-developed musculature...
...hasn't evolution produced more mice with rippling chests? "We're just starting to look into this," Lee explains. The burly mice seem to be a little slower and less timid than their normal counterparts. "That probably wouldn't be much of an advantage in the wild," says...
...myostatin-blocking drug could one day add muscles to the frames of people wasting away from cancer or AIDS. A drug that could triple muscle mass might also find a market among body builders, but that's a long way off. Scientists today know only what myostatin does in mice, and they still haven't determined at what cost to the animals' health or longevity...