[/caption]An article in Science Daily explains a process to switch off essential genes in adult mice and then turn them back on in order to not kill the animal. Turning off a gene is one way to learn how a gene functions. However, when the gene is essential to the survival of an organism the organism will die and you may not quite understand the function of the gene once the organism dies. That is why it is a breakthrough that researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory are able to turn off any essential gene in adult mice and then turn it back on before the mice dies using RNA interference technology (RNAi).
The study explained how scientists turned off a gene that is essential for DNA replication in mice until the mice lost weight and nearly starved to death. At this point the gene was reactivated and the symptoms were reversed, thus saving the mice from death.
This is important because it is a technique that can be useful in a wide variety of studies. Seeing as mice are commonly used for testing, the ability to truly test how genes are expressed and how they can affect the mice can lead to new discoveries which may eventually improve our lives as humans. An example the article gives is the ability to test how a gene may affect the growth of a tumor in the brain. The ability to test genes in this way is a breakthrough especially when it comes to cancer research.
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