Word: miceli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some appear perfectly pedestrian, with the warm white fur and beady pink eyes of pet-store mice. Others are clearly extraordinary, waddling about on paws shaped like miniature dolphin flippers or swollen to the size of their larger relative, the rat. They are called transgenic mice, and in a nobly selfless fashion, they are revolutionizing modern biology. Hidden somewhere along the twisting chain of DNA found in every cell of their bodies are alien genes, injected by biologists. The study of these mutants and the effects of the interloping genes may help provide answers to such fundamental questions as what...
...Palmiter of the University of Washington in Seattle and their colleagues concocted a sort of two-part genetic mongrel. They fused a gene that produces rat growth hormone to a powerful regulatory switch cleaved from a mouse gene. That construct in hand, the scientists mated normal male and female mice, and then removed the fertilized eggs from the female before the egg and sperm nuclei had combined. Viewing the cell beneath a microscope and wielding a glass micropipette less than the width of a human hair, the researchers injected their fusion construct into the larger male nucleus and then implanted...
Their strategy worked beautifully. The growth-hormone gene was incorporated into the DNA of about a third of the mouse pups and, most important, was activated in a variety of tissues. These offspring, spurred on by the extra portion of growth hormone, ballooned to twice the size of normal mice. What is more, because the new gene was present in all their cells, including their sex cells, it was passed along to the next generation. Says Brinster: "We're now doing work on the seventh generation of Supermouse...
...leading to Paul and Carolyn Zeiger's desert property in Pima County, Ariz., and leaps onto the flat roof of their adobe-style house. As long as their pet terrier, Stella, is inside, they don't worry much. "The bobcat jumps around up there and takes care of the mice," says Carolyn, 61, a clinical psychologist from Boulder, Colo. The Zeigers also get the occasional rattlesnake on their porch, and in the summer they have to stay indoors to avoid the midday heat. But despite those inconveniences--and in part because of them--they have developed a deep love...
...donation] is essential for the type of work we need to do, which is to take the discovery we’ve made in simple organisms like flies into mice,” Sinclair said yesterday. “We needed an infusion of support...