Mouse lemurs are the smallest of the lemurs, and they are also the smallest of the primates.
They are tiny nocturnal primates that live in Madagascar.
Mouse lemurs are much more closely related to humans than are mice.
And we have learned that mice are not appropriate models for so many diseases.
So we're hoping that mouse lemurs will shed more light on human disease.
The Duke Lemur Center has the largest colony of mouse lemurs in the United States, and
so what we do at the Duke Lemur Center is we're growing our colony, both for purposes
of conservation and animal welfare, but also because we're very interested in better understanding
this phenomenon of a neurological disease that is progressive, plaques and tangles,
age-related dementia, very similar to what humans get in Alzheimer's.
An ancient mouse lemur is 12 to 13 years old.
I don't think any mouse lemur in captivity or otherwise has lived beyond 14 years.
To see how small they are, and how fast they are, is just remarkable.
To know that a primate can be that small is exciting.
We did not set out to study Alzheimer's disease.
We started to work on the genome assembly of the mouse lemur.
We wanted to have an assembled genome to help facilitate research in many areas of science,
from evolutionary biology to biomedicine.
And during the course of that work, we identified some really exciting commonalities between
mouse lemurs and humans that indicated a common molecular mechanism that could contribute
to diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and ALS.
We've been scanning the brains of live animals to compare what they look like when they're
healthy and young, to what it looks like when they're old and diseased.
To understand the origins of Alzheimer's disease, what we're doing is trying to illuminate the
"dark matter" of the genome.
We're trying to take a closer look at that in a new way.
What we're seeing is that there are certain gene pathways, commonly involved in metabolism
or mitochondrial function, that are influenced by the dark matter of the genome.
That are influenced by regions of the genome that were thought of as junk DNA.
The initial insight was based off of a mouse lemur-to-human comparison.
What is it about primate evolution that makes humans an outlier with respect to neurological
and neurodegenerative diseases?
At some stage I would love to participate and be part of this translational component,
where there are drugs that we want to test, and we can test them once we've demonstrated
safety of the drug, that we can test them in mouse lemurs.
The advantage there is that in humans, it could take decades to find out if it's going
to be useful.
Mouse lemurs age much more rapidly than we do, so we could find out in a matter of a
few years the same information that we could find in humans over decades.
We think that there are pathways involved in neurogenesis -- how the brain forms.
Those pathways are vulnerable to these mobile elements, to these retrotransposons.
Looking at the mouse lemur genome helped us to identify those commonalities, take a step
back, think about primate evolution, think about human evolution.
What is it about being human that makes us vulnerable to devastating neurological diseases?
It's important to understand that, because understanding that process is going to help
us discover a cure sooner than later.
What we want to know is how do we take this basic science knowledge and translate it into
treatment?