Latest House Mouse Stories

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Hybrid offspring of different house mice populations show a preference for mating with individuals from their father's original population Mate choice is a key factor in the evolution of new animal species. The choice of a specific mate can decisively influence the evolutionary development of a species. In mice, the attractiveness of a potential mate is conveyed by scent cues and ultrasonic vocalizations. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary...

TAU breeds population of lab mice with genetic diversity closer to humans With a 95 percent genomic similarity to humans, mice have long been used to learn about the genetic causes of human disease. Once researchers can shine a light on the genetic factors that cause disease in mice, they can start to develop prevention and treatment options to protect the human population. But this process, called genetic mapping, is a long and difficult road, made more challenging by the 5% difference...

House mice (Mus musculus) happily live wherever there are humans. When populations of humans migrate the mice often travel with them. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology has used evolutionary techniques on modern day and ancestral mouse mitochondrial DNA to show that the timeline of mouse colonization matches that of Viking invasion. During the Viking age (late 8th to mid 10th century) Vikings from Norway established colonies across...

It comes as a surprise to many that male house mice produce melodious songs to attract mates.  Unfortunately for us, because the melodies are in the ultra-sonic range human ears cannot detect them.  Through spectrographic analyses of the vocalizations of wild house mice, researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna  have found that the songs of male mice contain signals of individuality and kinship.  Their results appear in the journal Physiology & Behavior and in the...

A line of laboratory mice developed by a researcher from the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) drinks more alcohol than other animal models and consumes it in a fashion similar to humans: choosing alcohol over other options and binge drinking. Animal models previously available to alcohol abuse and alcoholism researchers do not get as drunk as the new strain, unless alcohol is the only choice of fluids, or alcohol is administered by the...

Like humans, mice that live in their natural habitat encounter bacteria and other pathogens that exercise their immune system, yet the lab mice typically used in immunology studies are raised in isolation from most diseases. A study on natural killer cells in wild mice published this week in Molecular Ecology examines the hypothesis that the unsterile living conditions faced by humans and wild mice may improve the readiness of the immune system to fight new infections. The findings suggest...

A new study shows how house mice found unexpected ways to evolve resistance to a common poison and thrive, despite humanity's best efforts to keep them at bay. Rice University researchers analyzed a genetic mutation that has given ordinary European house mice this extraordinary ability. The gene in question, known as vkorc1, is present in all mammals and manages vitamin K.  They found that a mutation to vkorc1 makes mice resistant to warfarin, an anticoagulant used as a blood thinner in...

Sharing about 95 percent of their genes with humans, mice are recognized around the world as the leading experimental model for studying human biology and disease. But, says Jackson Laboratory Professor Gary Churchill, Ph.D., researchers can learn even more "now that we really know what a laboratory mouse is, genetically speaking."Thanks to an in-depth analysis by a team led by Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena, PhD, in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Department of Genetics and...

A new study from the Center for Interdisciplinary Chronobiological Research at the University of Haifa has found an additional link between Light At Night (LAN) and cancer. This research joins a series of earlier studies carried out at the University of Haifa that also established the correlation. "High power light bulbs contribute more to "˜environmental light pollution', which the study has shown is a carcinogenic pollution," notes Prof. Abraham Haim, who headed the study.Earlier studies...

The researchers have named the pheromone 'darcin', after Jane Austen's hero in Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy. Darcin stimulates females to 'learn' an individual male's scent, reinforcing their memory of sexual attraction to that same male.Previous studies have shown that many mammals, from mice to elephants, use urine to communicate sexual attractiveness. In mice, females learn attraction to a male's scent through contact with urine and recall their attraction when the scent is detected at a...