This chapter explains some of the many different types of research that scientists use to study Huntington's Disease.
The above figure shows a rather strange mouse paw photographed under fluorescent light. Why on earth is this paw green? Despite its appearance, the mouse is not an alien nor has it taken a bath in nuclear waste. Instead—and this also sounds crazy, but it’s true—the greenness comes from a special “fluorescence gene” that belongs to a jellyfish! When the mouse was just an embryo, scientists inserted this special gene into it and the gene became incorporated into the mouse’s DNA. When the gene then had its effects in the mouse, the resulting fluorescent protein caused the mouse’s whole body to light up, just as if it were still in the jellyfish.
You might be asking yourself: what could this green mouse possibly have to do with Huntington’s Disease (HD)? Although it is not clear from the picture, the mouse may actually have a lot to do with HD. Since a foreign gene is incorporated in its DNA, the green mouse is called a transgenic mouse. The fluorescence gene is just one example of a multitude of genes from many different animals that researchers are now adding into mouse DNA. One particular gene of interest is the human HD gene, which has been inserted into transgenic mice for research purposes for a number of years. These mice are part of the large field of animal research, a field that is teaching scientists important new things about HD.
Animal research is just one piece of the immense HD research puzzle. Other forms of HD research include family tree studies, epidemiological studies, genetic studies, postmortem studies, and clinical studies. Each of these areas of research has contributed a great deal to our current understanding of HD. More importantly, each of these areas will help contribute to the exciting breakthroughs in future HD research. These various areas of research, and some of the facts that they have already uncovered, are the subject of this chapter.
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