Of Mice and Men

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Celera Corporation announced in early June that they had sequenced over 1 billion base pairs of the mouse genome. The mouse genome is similar in size to the human genome, approximately 3 billion base pairs, and decoding it will be vital to interpreting many aspects of the human genome. Mice and humans share most of the same genes and it will be possible to make comparisons between the two genomes as well as to perform extensive knock-out studies on mice, both of which will provide an exceptional vehicle for genetic analysis.