Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Around the same time that Gregor Mendel’s now famous pea experiments were being rediscovered, the first seeds of mammalian genetics were being inadvertently sown (Steensma et al, 2010 ). Like Mendel, Abbie Lathrop—an esteemed breeder of ‘fancy mice’ which were considered fashionable pets at the time— kept meticulous records of her crosses such that the parental heritage of each mouse could be traced back to its ancestral strain. At its height, Lathrop’s fancy colony housed over 11,000 mice (Steensma et al, 2010 ) and, in 1902, Lathrop sold mice to Harvard University geneticist William Ernest Castle and his student Clarence Cook Little. The pair went on to conduct the first Mendelian analysis in mammals, and Little eventually formed the Jackson Laboratories. C57BL/6J mice, perhaps the most ubiquitous strain in all of the metabolic research, are direct descendants of Lathrop’s 'mouse 57' (Steensma et al, 2010 ). It seems that much of this history has been lost to the metabolic field, however, since many researchers perform experiments exclusively on the C57BL/6J strain, even though the first standardised mouse experiments took the form of multi-parent, or multi-strain, studies (Little and Tyzzer, 1916 ; Tyzzer, 1909 ).
Source: The EMBO Journal
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $6,890
Funder: Australian Government
OpenAlex ID: W4402581233