Scientists bre mice with different tail lengths

photo source: Cell Publishing Group
two teams studying mouse development accidentally created mice with special tails and short tails. The paper, published recently in Developmental Cells, provides new insights into controlling the development of a mouse's tail and sheds new insight into what happens when developmental pathways go wrong.
, senior author of one of the papers and a researcher at the Gulbenkian de Ciencia Institute in Portugal, said: "Regulatory networks that control the mechanisms of body formation are often exploited by other developmental processes. Studying these networks can provide us with information about other developmental processes, even pathological processes.
the findings of both groups of scientists are linked to a gene called Lin28, which has been shown to play an important role in regulating body size and metabolism.
"We tried to make models of lin28-driven cancer mice, but we were surprised to find that these mice had long tails. They have more vertebrae. George Daley, a fellow and dean of Harvard Medical School, another senior author of the paper, said.
, on the other hand, Mallo is working on a gene called Gdf11, which has been shown to be associated with tail development during embryonic development. The team found that Gfd11 mutant mice had shorter and thicker tails than normal mice. "They also have a fully developed neural tube in their body, rather than a normal tail made up of vertebrae." "We were able to identify the Lin28 and Hox13 genes as key regulatory factors for the development of the lower tail of Gdf11," Mallo said. "
both pathways are associated with the development of the body section, and these cell blocks eventually differentiate into the skin, skeletal muscles, cartilage, tendons, and vertebrae. As mammals develop, the body sections are arranged in order along the body axis. Lin28 plays a regulating role in this process.
study is also important for understanding evolution. "Front and rear axle elongity is an important feature of two-sided animals, and natural selection creates different tail lengths to accommodate different evolutionary pressures," said Daisy Robinton, a researcher at Harvard University's Daley Laboratory. So far, little is known about how this length is controlled and how gene action affects morphology. The
next step for Daley's lab is to find out if Lin28/let-7 is playing a similar role in other organ systems and to explore more deeply how this pathway affects the fate of cells in mammalian development.
for Mallo, future work will focus on revealing details of how these participants regulate the activity of the tail bud ancestral cells and deepening understanding of how these molecular interactions are regulated. (Source: Tang Erdu, China Science Daily)
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