WIKIPEDIA, RAMAMice are widely used to model human metabolism, disease, and drug response. But results published today (November 17) in PNAS reveal widespread differences between human and mouse gene expression, both in protein-coding and noncoding genes, suggesting that understanding these disparities could help explain fundamental differences in the two species’ physiology.
Michael Snyder of Stanford University and his colleagues compared how genes are expressed in 15 different human and mouse tissues, including brain, heart, liver, and kidney. They found that gene expression patterns clustered by species rather than tissues. For example, gene expression in a mouse liver more closely resembled the patterns observed in a mouse heart than those observed in a human liver. Using data from the ENCODE and modENCODE projects, among other sources, the analysis spanned “the most tissue-diverse RNA-seq dataset to date,” the authors wrote in their paper.
The results “go a little against the grain,” said bioinformatician Mark Gerstein of Yale University who was not involved in the study. “We might think that humans and mice are very similar [genetically], but when ...
