Researchers have used
high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to analyse milk proteins in mice of the Mus spretus species.
Mus spretus differs from the normal Mus musculus species by exhibiting a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) for each 100 of its base pairs.
This helps in research when compared with the high phenotypic and genotypic variability of classic laboratory strains.
Writing in BMC Genomics, the team from French research agency INRA, Institut Pasteur and Romania's Universitatea de Stiinte Agricole si Medicina Veterinara Cluj-Napoca explain how genes with milk protein-encoding associations differed from the full-genome analysis of mice previously carried out.
In particular, their HPLC analysis found twice as many additional SNPs in the Mus spretus mice's genes as in those of the Mus musculus strain, compared with the predicted figure from full-genome research.
BMC Genomics addresses all aspects of the discipline, including analysis at the genome scale and related proteomics studies.