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How certain animals help with human studies

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How certain animals help with human studies

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a few examples on how animals have helped with human research

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Animal Research has brought about many medical benefits. This page discusses a handful of examples where animal testing has been instrumental in the development of a medical treatment.
"Americans are living longer, healthier lives and we owe much of that success to biomedical research," said Robert Palazzo, Ph.D, President of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Below is just a small selection of the major medical breakthroughs made possible by animal research. These treatments have been used to save or improve the lives of many millions of people worldwide. For more referenced case histories of past and current treatments developed using animals download the booklet " Medical Advances and Animal Research", produced by UAR.

To find more examples of how animal studies have contributed to medical breakthroughs, please see our Research Index, which lists all our posts categorised by either the species involved, or the disease addressed.

What's next?
Research on mouse models of motor neurone disease (MND) have demonstrated the important of a growth factor called VEGF. A single injection of a virus carrying a gene for VEGF delayed onset and slowed progression in MND mice. Work on dogs, particularly dachshunds who are prone to spinal injury and whose owners are glad to allow them to have new treatments, has prompted human clinical trials for spinal injury. Fetal stem cells injected into the brains of stroke injured rats were shown to migrate to injured areas. Such research is essential. And if it could be done in other ways, it would be.

The above piece was commissioned by the Guardian newspaper under the heading "What have Guinea Pigs ever done for us?" and published on 1st September 2005. Reproduced above with permission from author, Vivienne Parry.

Furthermore - Have a look at this timeline of medical research originally created for animalresearch.info (which has more information on each breakthrough).

Timeline of Medical Advances made possible by Animal Experiments

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Animal Research has brought about many medical benefits. This page discusses a handful of examples where animal testing has been instrumental in the development of a medical treatment. "Americans are living longer, healthier lives and we owe much of that success to biomedical research," said Robert Palazzo, Ph.D, President of the Federation of American Societies...

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Focus on the graphics and how the measure or affect sleep

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this is about how scientist are encoding the DNA

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The term "life hacking" usually refers to clever tweaks that make your life more productive. But this week in Science, a team of scientists comes a step closer to the literal meaning: hacking the machinery of life itself. They have designed-though not completely assembled-a synthetic Escherichia coli genome that could use a protein-coding scheme different from the one employed by all known life. Requiring a staggering 62,000 DNA changes, the finished genome would be the most complicated genetic engineering feat so far. E. coli running this rewritten genome could become a new workhorse for laboratory experiments and a factory for new industrial chemicals, its creators predict.

Such a large-scale genomic hack once seemed impossible, but no longer, says Peter Carr, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington who is not involved with the project. "It's not easy, but we can engineer life at profound scales, even something as fundamental as the genetic code."

The genome hacking is underway in the lab of George Church at Harvard University, the DNA-sequencing pioneer who has become the most high-profile, and at times controversial, name in synthetic biology. The work takes advantage of the redundancy of life's genetic code, the language that DNA uses to instruct the cell's protein-synthesizing machinery. To produce proteins, cells "read" DNA's four-letter alphabet in clusters of three called codons. The 64 possible triplets are more than enough to encode the 20 amino acids that exist in nature, as well as the "stop" codons that mark the ends of genes. As a result, the genetic code has multiple codons for the same amino acid: the codons CCC and CCG both encode the amino acid proline, for example.

Church and others hypothesized that redundant codons could be eliminated-by swapping out every CCC for a CCG in every gene, for instance-without harming the cell. The gene that enables CCC to be translated into proline could then be deleted entirely. "There are a number of 'killer apps'" of such a "recoded" cell, says Farren Isaacs, a bioengineer at Yale University, who, with Church and colleagues, showed a stop codon can be swapped out entirely from E. coli.

The cells could be immune to viruses that impair bioreactors, for example, if crucial viral genes include now untranslatable codons. The changes could also allow synthetic biologists to repurpose the freed redundant codons for an entirely different function, such as coding for a new, synthetic amino acid.

For this study, Church's team decided to eliminate seven of the microbe's 64 codons. That target seemed like "a good balance" between the number of changes that appeared technically achievable and the number that might be too many for a cell to survive, says Matthieu Landon, one of Church's Ph.D. students. And the seven spare codons could eventually be repurposed to code up to four different unnatural amino acids.

But making so many changes, even with the latest DNA editing techniques such as CRISPR, still appeared impossible. Luckily, the cost of synthesizing DNA has plummeted over the past decade. So instead of editing the genome one site at a time, Church's team used machines to synthesize long stretches of the recoded genome from scratch, each chunk containing multiple changes.

The team has now turned to the laborious job of inserting these chunks into E. coli one by one and making sure that none of the genomic changes is lethal to the cells. The researchers have only tested 63% of the recoded genes so far, but remarkably few of the changes have caused trouble, they say.

Does this progress report from Church's lab put biologists on the doorstep of a new era of virus-free bioengineered cells? "More likely on the driveway than the doorstep," Isaacs says. Carr agrees. "The upcoming phases of synthesis, testing, and assembly are likely to take several years," he says. "The toughest 5% of the design may end up requiring 95% of the effort."

In the meantime, another issue is likely to dominate discussions: safety. One concern is that many of the "unnatural" proteins that the recoded E. coli could be engineered to produce may be toxic, and the cells' resistance to viruses would give them a competitive edge if they escaped into the environment-or into our own guts. "As we get closer to full multivirus resistance, this becomes more critical," Church acknowledges.

The failsafe that Church plans to build into the microbes is superficially similar to the one used to control the bioengineered dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park. Those resurrected creatures couldn't survive without a special nutrient supplied by their human masters-that is, until they found a source of the nutrient in the wild. In a study published in Nature last year, Church demonstrated a failsafe system for engineered microbes that should be far more robust. Not only does the required nutrient not occur naturally, but it appears to be virtually impossible for the cells to overcome the barrier through mutation or mating with normal cells in the wild.

Whether others will agree with Church that his failsafe is unbeatable remains to be seen. "The term 'safe' needs a lot more scrutiny," Carr says. "Instead of the all-or-nothing connotations of 'safe' or 'not safe,' it is more useful to describe degrees of risk."

doi:10.1126/science.aah7205

John is a former contributing correspondent for Science.

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Biologists are close to reinventing the genetic code of life

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The term "life hacking" usually refers to clever tweaks that make your life more productive. But this week in Science , a team of scientists comes a step closer to the literal meaning: hacking the machinery of life itself.

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how and why organisms change through the course of evolution

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Forces of Evolution Defined

May the force be with you. Or, in this case, may the four forces be with you. It's a life or death, high-stakes game of evolution, and every creature, every plant, is going to need all the help it can get. In an ever-changing world, species are trying to adapt, compete, and sometimes just get lucky, in an effort to continue their existence.

So what are these mysterious four forces of evolution? They include mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection.

Mutation

Mutations happen just by chance. Somewhere along the line, a change in a gene or a chromosome shows up as a physical or a behavioral difference in an individual. Because it affects a gene or chromosome, it can then be passed to the next generation. Maybe you think of a mutation as a creepy-looking new feature, but not always. A cat that has six toes on each foot has a mutation that has been passed on from a cat far in the past. Okay that might be a little creepy, but here's one that's not: It's believed that red hair in people was a mutation. Redheads are only 1 to 2 percent of the population. It may be rare, but not too creepy!

Gene Flow

In gene flow, two populations mix genes. Over time there's less distinction between those populations. So, let's say there are two populations of polar bears that have not met in the recent past. Each population was existing on their own, separate chunks of land for a very long time. One population lived to the south and one population lived in the north. There was no reason, or perhaps no way, to have met before. Then, as the climate started to change and more of the sea ice started to melt, the polar bears in the south were not finding the habitats they needed to survive. They started to shift their population towards the north and met the other population of polar bears. Once they started interbreeding, the genetic distinctions decreased. True story. Scientists are seeing this example of gene flow right now.

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the four forces of evolution - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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The Four Forces of Evolution - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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May the force be with you. Or, in this case, may the four forces be with you. It's a life or death, high-stakes game of evolution, and every creature, every plant, is going to need all the help it can get.