Ferret Genome Could Hold Clues to Respiratory Diseases

In a breakthrough study, scientists have sequenced the ferret genome in an attempt to provide clues to respiratory diseases such as influenza and cystic fibrosis.

"The sequencing of the ferret genome is a big deal," Michael Katze, University of Washington (UW) professor of microbiology who led the research, said in a news release. "Every time you sequence a genome, it allows you to answer a wide range of questions you couldn't before. Having the genome changes a field forever."

Ferrets, small mammals belonging to the weasel family, are ideal animal models for studying human diseases because they share similar strains that infect us. In the same way that infections spread from human to human, they spread among ferrets.

Scientists at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in collaboration with Katze and colleagues of UW, decided to sequence the genome of a domestic sable ferret, Mustela putorius furo. After using a technique called transcriptome analysis to identify all RNA in the ferret's genome, researchers could determine which cells respond when combating diseases like influenza and cystic fibrosis.

Looking at Influenza

Once they sequenced the whole ferret genome, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madision, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, exposed ferrets in a lab to reconstructed versions of two deadly viruses similar to influenza: the one that caused the so-called Spanish flu that killed 25 million people worldwide during a pandemic in 1918, and the swine-flu virus that became infamous in 2009-2010. (Scroll to read on...)