Super treat in the lab this week. The journal Science decided to feature one of our publications in its “Editor’s Choice” section. The author of the little piece is Laura Zahn and she chose to feature the work, which was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
It is always a real thrill to have work highlighted and appreciated in this way.
The manuscript in question involved a comparative analysis of the innate immune systems between humans and mice. We use methods that compare the rates of non-synonymous and synonymous substitutions in protein-coding genes, as well as using population genomic data (from the 1,000 human genomes projects and the 17 mouse genomes project).
What we found was that the innate immune systems of human and mouse have undergone divergent selective pressures in their 200 million years of independent evolution (100 million years on each lineage – give or take a few million years). Linking this information with known differences in phenotype between human and mouse brings us closer to better modeling of human diseases.
You can find the paper at http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/03/30/molbev.msv051.full.pdf+html
Of mice and men
