![]() The problem with this process, however, is that each knockout mouse takes about one and one-half years to engineer and costs $50,000 in reagents alone, limiting the number of mice that can be generated. This process was developed in the 1980s and won its inventors the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1989. If the knockout manifests signs of the disease being studied, the gene that was turned off is probably involved. Next they try to determine the function of the gene(s) that was (were) turned off by observing the difference between a normal mouse and the knockout. To use a mouse as a model, researchers genetically engineer a mouse by turning off one or more of its genes, resulting in what is called a knockout mouse. Researchers use mouse models to study human disease because mice are easy to work with and closely related to humans, genetically speaking. Millen thinks she has found a way to fix this problem. Trying to determine specifically which of those genes have something to do with a particular disease is expensive and time consuming, creating huge bottlenecks in many fields of study. The Human Genome Project has allowed scientists to readily identify regions of the genome where diseases reside, but each region includes many genes. Goal: Develop a fast, inexpensive way to generate mouse models to study human genetic diseases.Source: National Institutes of Health ARRA Funding.Principal Investigator: Kathleen Millen, Associate Professor of Human Genetics Committee on Genetics and Committee on Neurobiology at the University of Chicago.
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