Programmed for skin cancer. A mouse ear and tail with melanoma lesions.
The mice were created "completely by accident," says Suzie Chen biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Chen and colleagues studied obesity at the time. For their experiments, they created mutant mouse lines by inserting bits of foreign DNA. They noted that one of their germinated mutant mice, the dark cancerous tumors, which were found to be melanoma lesions. The research team put the fat study for melanoma -. A disease for which there were few good animal models
They determined that the inserted DNA, designed to create fat mice had inadvertently landed in the middle of a region of the gene that encodes a neurotransmitter glutamate receptor, causing an abnormal production of the receptor. glutamate receptors were once thought to be limited to the brain, but have recently turned into the bone and skin. Partnering with researchers from other institutions, laboratory Chen has created a new line of mice that expressed too much of a glutamate receptor. These mice also had a melanoma disease as a human, which propagate through the body. Cells taken from their tumors showed a disorder of glutamate receptor gene. The researchers also found expression even glutamate receptor in about a third of human melanoma specimens have been tested. This finding, Chen said, shows that a mutation affecting the glutamate receptor gene "may be relevant, but can not show that it is the cause in one way or the other humans." The work was published online April 21 in Nature Genetics .
This mouse model was long overdue "because its highly metastatic mimics the behavior of deadly aspect of human disease," says David Fisher, a melanoma researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston . However, he said, the involvement of the glutamate receptor gene is still not yet fully understood. Lynda Chin, Harvard University, says that "this particular receptor may or may not be a great player, but this data tells you is that this pathway could be important. "
Related Sites
CDC fact sheet skin cancer
homepage Suzie Chen
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