Progress in Mouse Science

Can a hypermuscular, neuroprismatic ultramouse be far off? The worm turns, and the hunter becomes the huntress….or so it seems.

The genetically engineered mice can eat 60 percent more than wild mice in a control group but remain slim and fit. The “mighty mice” live longer, and some females were able to reproduce much later in life than other mice….The researchers said some “have had offspring at 2.5 years of age, an amazing feat considering most mice do not reproduce after they are one year old.”...Hanson said the strength of the mice was made possible by the fact that they produce very little lactic acid, which forms during intense exercise….Scientists bred 500 of the mice, which also showed more aggression than other mice, over the past five years as part of a project aimed at unlocking the metabolic and physiological function of PEPCK-C in muscles and tissues….The key to their unusual traits is the over-expression of the gene that influence production of the enzyme PEPCK-C (phosphoenolypyruvate carboxykinases), said Hanson.

Professor Hanson said: “The purpose of our experiment was to study energy metabolism in the mice and the role that a single, metabolically important enzyme might play in a tissue in which it is not normally expressed at high levels.“He said that the physical and behavioural changes in the modified mice were completely unexpected. Usually, scientists have to carry out blood tests to see if there has been any effect of altering the genes, but these mice were noticeably different at a very early age….“We could spot them at just a few weeks after birth. They popped around the cage like popcorn. We found that they were about 10 times as active as ordinary mice.”....Further research on the mice could shed light on the link between high-calorie diets and cancer, and low-calorie diets and longevity…. “Our animals live longer and eat almost twice as much as ordinary mice – this is a model to study….On the downside, they eat twice as much as control mice, but they are half the weight, and are very aggressive. Why this is the case, we are not really sure.”

Researchers have figured out how to splice this gene into laboratory mice to make only their neurons glow. At first, they only glowed green. But others have tinkered with the gene to create hues of red, yellow and blue…Now, Livet has figured out how to mix and match these colors to create roughly 90 bright hues that form a riotous display. He used a genetic recombination system known as Cre/lox to arrange the genes that encode the colored proteins, lighting up only nerve cells in mice.

HAIL THE ULTRAMOUSE!

Posted by Søren Renner on Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 08:50 PM in
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Posted by Svigor on November 03, 2007, 11:40 AM | #

U.S. researchers have manipulated neurons in mice to light up in a rainbow of fluorescent hues, creating a powerful tool for mapping out the brain’s complicated wiring plan, they said on Wednesday.

Forgive my ignorant bumbling, but isn’t this a first (huge) step toward true AI? What’s to stop us from using this technology to a) map any number of human brains and b) use those maps to recreate the brains with hardware and/or software?

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