Minute to Understanding: Modeling human diversity ... in mice!

7.5 billion people, over 8,000 cultures, and we're not even counting the aliens. How can scientific research get answers when there's so much human diversity?

Well, lab mice have revealed a lot about human biology, but lab buys aren't diverse.

In fact, they're usually genetically identical to each other, like twins, so that experiments can be more precise.

Scientists have come up with a solution and it's called the Collaborative Cross. Instead of taking offspring from just one set of parents, we pool all of the offspring from eight very different sets of parents. After separating each of them, sequencing their DNA, and breeding them, we suddenly have an impressive group of very diverse mice to study. And what's important is that, unlike in humans, we know their exact genetics, which means we can finally address how diversity affects disease and human health. 

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