House mouse Conservation status: Secure
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Mammalia Order: Rodentia Family: Muridae Subfamily: Murinae Genus: Mus Species: M. musculus
Binomial name
Mus musculus Linnaeus, 1758

Mus musculus is the common house mouse. This mouse is believed to be the second most populous mammalian species on Earth, after Homo sapiens. House mice almost always live in close proximity of humans. Laboratory mice are strains of house mice that form important model organisms in biology and medicine; they are the most commonly used laboratory mammal. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Scientific classification or biological classification is how biologists group and categorize extinct and living species of organisms. ... Phyla Porifera (sponges) Ctenophora (comb jellies) Cnidaria Placozoa Subregnum Bilateria  Acoelomorpha  Orthonectida  Rhombozoa  Myxozoa  Superphylum Deuterostomia     Chordata (vertebrates, etc. ... Typical Classes Subphylum Urochordata - Tunicates Ascidiacea Thaliacea Larvacea Subphylum Cephalochordata - Lancelets Subphylum Myxini - Hagfishes Subphylum Vertebrata - Vertebrates Petromyzontida - Lampreys Placodermi (extinct) Chondrichthyes - Cartilaginous fishes Acanthodii (extinct) Actinopterygii - Ray-finned fishes Actinistia - Coelacanths Dipnoi - Lungfishes Amphibia - Amphibians Reptilia - Reptiles Aves - Birds Mammalia - Mammals Chordates (phylum Chordata) include the vertebrates, together with... Orders Subclass Monotremata Monotremata Subclass Marsupialia Didelphimorphia Paucituberculata Microbiotheria Dasyuromorphia Peramelemorphia Notoryctemorphia Diprotodontia Subclass Placentalia Xenarthra Dermoptera Desmostylia Scandentia Primates Rodentia Lagomorpha Insectivora Chiroptera Pholidota Carnivora Perissodactyla Artiodactyla Cetacea Afrosoricida Macroscelidea Tubulidentata Hyracoidea Proboscidea Sirenia The mammals are the class of vertebrate animals characterized by the presence of mammary glands... Families Many, see text The order Rodentia is the most numerous of all the branches on the mammal family tree. ... Subfamilies See text Muridae is the largest family of mammals. ... Genera see text The Old World rats and mice, part of the subfamily Murinae in the family Muridae, comprise at least 519 species. ... Mus can refer to: a genus, to which the mouse belongs a city in Turkey, capital of Mus Province Mus, a commune of the Gard département in France This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... In biology, binomial nomenclature is a standard convention used for naming species. ... A painting of Carolus Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné (   listen?), and who wrote under the Latinized name Carolus Linnaeus (May 23, 1707 – January 10, 1778), was a Swedish botanist who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of taxonomy. ... Feral mouse A mouse is a mammal that belongs to one of numerous species of small rodents in the genus Mus and various related genera of the family Muridæ (Old World Mice). ... Orders Subclass Monotremata Monotremata Subclass Marsupialia Didelphimorphia Paucituberculata Microbiotheria Dasyuromorphia Peramelemorphia Notoryctemorphia Diprotodontia Subclass Placentalia Xenarthra Dermoptera Desmostylia Scandentia Primates Rodentia Lagomorpha Insectivora Chiroptera Pholidota Carnivora Perissodactyla Artiodactyla Cetacea Afrosoricida Macroscelidea Tubulidentata Hyracoidea Proboscidea Sirenia The mammals are the class of vertebrate animals characterized by the presence of mammary glands... In biology, a species is a kind of organism. ... Human beings are defined variously in biological, spiritual, and cultural terms, or in combinations thereof. ... A model organism is one that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in the model organism will provide insight into the workings of other organisms. ... Main articles: Life All organisms (viruses not included) consist of cells, which in turn, are based on a common carbon-based biochemistry. ... Medicine on the Web NLM (National Library of Medicine, contains resources for patients and healthcare professionals) Virtual Hospital (digital health sciences library by the University of Iowa) Online Medical Dictionary Collection of links to free medical resources Categories: Medicine | Health ...

Physical description

House mice are light brown to black, with short hair and a light belly. Laboratory mice and pet mice are often white. The ears and tail have little hair. Adults weigh some 12 to 40 grams; their body (including tail) is about 15-19 centimeters long, with the tail usually accounting for a bit more than half of it. House mice, especially males, have a characteristic musky odor. The gram or gramme, symbol g, is a unit of mass, and is defined in the SI system of units as one one-thousandth of a kilogram (i. ... cm redirects here, alternate uses: cm (disambiguation) A centimetre (symbol cm; American spelling: centimeter) is an SI unit of length. ...

Young males and females are not easily distinguished; females have a significantly smaller distance between their anus and genital opening. When sexually mature, the most striking and obvious difference is the presence of testicles on the males. These are relatively large compared to the rest of the body, being approximately half the size of the mouse's skull and usually hairless. They can be retracted into the body. Females have 5 pairs of mammary glands and nipples; males lack visible nipples. Human male anatomy The testicles, known medically as testes (singular testis), are the male generative glands in animals. ... Mammary glands are milk-secreting adaptations of sweat glands and are the characteristic of mammals which gave the class its name. ... Nipple is, generally, the name given to the mammalian nipple, or to things resembling it, such as the tip of an artificial teat or the tip of a grease secreting mechanism in machinery. ...

House mice have Harderian glands near their eyes which produce a reddish-brown discharge when the mouse is stressed.

Behavior

House mice usually walk, run or stand on all fours, but when eating, fighting or orienting themselves, they stand only on the hind legs, supported by the tail. When running, the horizontal tail serves for balance; the end stands up vertically, unless the mouse is frightened. Mice are good jumpers, climbers and swimmers.

Mice are mostly active during dusk or night; they do not like bright lights. They live in a wide variety of hidden places that are near food sources and construct nests from various soft materials. Mice are territorial and one dominant male usually lives together with several females and young. If two or more males are held together in a cage, they will often turn aggressive unless they have been raised together from birth.

House mice primarily feed on plant matter, but they will also accept meat and dairy products. They will drink water but require little of it, relying mainly on the moisture present in their food. They will eat their feces to acquire nutrients produced by bacteria in their guts. Rabbit feces are usually 0. ... Phyla/Divisions Actinobacteria Aquificae Bacteroidetes/Chlorobi Chlamydiae/Verrucomicrobia Chloroflexi Chrysiogenetes Cyanobacteria Deferribacteres Deinococcus-Thermus Dictyoglomi Fibrobacteres/Acidobacteria Firmicutes Fusobacteria Gemmatimonadetes Nitrospirae Omnibacteria Planctomycetes Proteobacteria Spirochaetes Thermodesulfobacteria Thermomicrobia Thermotogae Bacteria is also the fictional name of a warring nation under Benzino Napaloni as dictator, in the 1940 film The Great Dictator...

Mice are afraid of rats, which often kill and (partially) eat them. This rat behavior is known as muricide. Species 50 species; see text *Several subfamilies of Muroids include animals called rats. ...

Life cycle and reproduction

A very young mouse

Female house mice have an estrous cycle that is 4-6 days long, with estrus itself lasting less than a day. If several females are held together under crowded conditions, they will often not have an estrus at all; if they are then exposed to male urine, they will become estrous after 72 hours. Download high resolution version (1280x850, 1035 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Download high resolution version (1280x850, 1035 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Estrus (also spelled œstrus) or heat in female mammals is the period of greatest female sexual responsiveness usually coinciding with ovulation. ...

Following copulation, female mice will normally develop a vaginal plug which prevents further copulation. This plug stays in place for some 24 hours. The gestation period is about 19-21 days, and they give birth to a litter of 3-14 young (average 6-8). One female can have some 5-10 litters per year, so their population can increase very quickly. Breeding occurs throughout the year (however, animals living in the wild don't reproduce in the colder months, even though they don't hibernate). The newborn are blind and furless. Fur starts to grow some three days after birth and the eyes open one to two weeks after birth. Females reach sexual maturity at about 6 weeks and males at about 8 weeks, but both can breed as early as 35 days. A pregnant woman Pregnancy is the process by which a mammalian female carries a live offspring from conception until it develops to the point where the offspring is capable of living outside the womb. ... This article refers to the process of hibernation in biology. ...

House mice live about 1-2 years on average. The Methuselah mouse contest is a competition to breed or engineer extremely long-lived laboratory mice. As of 2004, the record holder was a genetically engineered mouse that lived for 1819 days, nearly 5 years. The Methuselah Mouse Prize is a contest started in Sept. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Senses and communication

As primarily nocturnal animals, house mice have little or no color vision. They have a sharp sense of hearing and can perceive ultrasound, possibly up to 100kHz. They communicate both in the human audible range with squeaks (for long-distance warnings), and in the ultrasound range (for short-distance communication). Prior to and during copulation, the male emits characteristic short sounds in the 40kHz and 70kHz range; the precise function of these is not understood. Color vision is a psychophysical phenomenon that exists only in our minds. ... Ultrasound is sound with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing, approximately 20 kilohertz. ... The hertz (symbol Hz) is the SI unit of frequency. ...

House mice also rely on pheromones. These are produced by the preputial glands of both sexes and are excreted with urine. The pheromones are detected with the Jacobson's organ, located at the bottom of the nose. Fanning honeybee exposes Nasonov gland (white-at tip of abdomen) releasing pheromone to entice swarm into an empty hive A pheromone is any chemical produced by a living organism that transmits a message to other members of the same species. ... Urine is liquid waste excreted by the kidneys and eventually expelled from the body in a process known as urination. ... The vomeronasal organ (VNO) or Jacobsons organ (sometimes misspelled Jacobsens) is an auxiliary olfactory sense organ in some vertebrates, all of which are tetrapods. ...

The mice can sense surfaces and air movements with their whiskers. This article is about vibrissae, often called whiskers. ...

Subspecies

A number of subspecies of Mus musculus have been described:

• Mus musculus bactrianus (southwestern Asian house mouse)
• Mus musculus castaneus (southeastern Asian house mouse)
• Mus musculus domesticus or Mus domesticus (western European house mouse)
• Mus musculus gentilulus
• Mus musculus homourus
• Mus musculus molossinus
• Mus musculus musculus (eastern European house mouse)
• Mus musculus praetextus
• Mus musculus wagneri

Mice and men

House mice usually live in close proximity of humans, in or around houses or fields. Originally native to Asia (probably Northern India), they spread to Europe and humans introduced them all over the world only fairly recently. World map showing location of Asia Asia is the central and eastern part of the continent of Eurasia, defined by subtracting the European peninsula from Eurasia. ...

Laboratory mouse

House mice can transmit diseases, and their droppings can spoil foods. They can also cause substantial damage when feeding on grain. It is thought that house mice were the primary reason for the taming of the domestic cat. Various mousetraps have been developed to catch mice. Generally, rats are more harmful to humans than mice. A mouse-astronaut candidate poses atop a model solar panel. ... A mouse-astronaut candidate poses atop a model solar panel. ... Trinomial name Felis silvestris catus Schreber, 1775 For alternative meanings see cat (disambiguation). ... A baited and primed mousetrap. ... Species 50 species; see text *Several subfamilies of Muroids include animals called rats. ...

House mice have been bred as pets for a long time, producing numerous strains of "fancy mice" with unusual colors or behaviors. The laboratory strains are of prime importance in science. white fancy mouse Fancy mice are domesticated versions of the common or house mouse (mus musculus). ...

Laboratory mice

Mice are convenient in research because their physiology is similar to that of humans (though rats are a better models for certain diseases) and their short life cycle makes breeding easy. They are mainly used to model human diseases in order to develop new drugs, and to test the safety of proposed drugs. Binomial name Rattus norvegicus (Berkenhout, 1769) The Brown Rat or Norway Rat (Rattus norvegicus) is one of the most well-known and common rats, and also one of the largest. ...

The US Animal Welfare Act covers most mammals but specifically excludes laboratory mice and rats. Most academic research institutes seek voluntary accreditation which requires certain minimal standards of care for laboratory animals. This accredation is a prerequisite for federal funding.

Most laboratory mice are hybrids of different subspecies, most commonly of Mus musculus domesticus and Mus musculus musculus. Laboratory mice are often white, and some are albinos. Many (but not all) laboratory strains are inbred, so as to make them genetically almost identical. The different strains are identified with short letter-digit combinations; for instance, the strand whose genome was sequenced in 2002 (see below) is C57BL/6J. Albinism is a genetic condition resulting in a lack of pigmentation in the eyes, skin and hair. ... Inbreeding is breeding between close relatives. ...

The first such inbred strains were produced by Clarence Cook Little in 1909. Little was influential in promoting the mouse as a laboratory organism. Clarence Cook C.C. Little (October 6, 1888–1971) was an American genetics, cancer, and tobacco researcher. ... 1909 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ...

The behavioral patterns of laboratory mice are significantly different from those of most common house mice due to years of lab breeding. These behaviors are much more simplistic.

Genome

Albino lab mice

Sequencing of the mouse's genome was completed in late 2002. It is about 2.5 billion base pairs long and contains roughly 30,000 genes, about as many as the human genome. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... In biology the genome of an organism is the whole hereditary information of an organism that is encoded in the DNA (or, for some viruses, RNA). ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The word billion and its equivalents in other languages, refer to one of two different numbers. ... In genetics, two nucleotides on opposite complementary DNA or RNA strands that are connected via hydrogen bonds are called a base pair (often abbreviated bp). ... This stylistic schematic diagram shows a gene in relation to the double helix structure of DNA and to a chromosome (right). ...

Mutant and transgenic strains

Various mutant strains of mice have been created by a number of methods:

• Mice resulting from ordinary breeding
  • Waltzing mice, showing a peculiar style of walking due to a mutation affecting their inner ear
  • Nude mice, lacking hair and a thymus. The mice don't produce T lymphocytes and therefore don't mount cellular immune responses. They are used for research in immunology and transplantation.
  • Severe Combined Immunodeficient or SCID mice, with an almost completely defective immune system
• Transgenic mice, with foreign genes inserted into their genome
  • Large mice, with an inserted rat growth hormone gene
  • Oncomice, with an activated oncogene, so as to significantly increase the incidence of cancer
  • Doogie mice, with enhanced NMDA receptor function, resulting in improved memory and learning
• Knockout mice, where a specific gene was made inoperable by a technique known as gene knockout; the aim is to study the function of the gene's product or to simulate a human disease.
  • Strong mice, with a disabled myostatin gene.

Since 1998, it has been possible to clone mice from cells derived from adult animals. Breeding has several meanings related to procreation: In animal husbandry and in horticulture the selection of stock for propagation and the act of insemination by natural or artificial means is called breeding. ... For an alternative meaning, see ear (botany). ... A nude mouse is a genetic mutant that has no thymus gland, and has a severely reduced immune system. ... In human anatomy, the thymus is a ductless gland located in the upper anterior portion of the chest cavity. ... T cells are a subset of lymphocytes that play a large role in the immune response. ... Immunology is a broad branch of biomedical science that covers study of all aspects of the immune system in all organisms. ... An organ transplant is the transplantation of an organ (or part of one) from one body to another, for the purpose of replacing the recipients damaged or failing organ with a working one from the donor. ... Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or SCID, is a genetic disorder in which both arms (B cells and T cells) of the adaptive immune system are crippled, due to a defect in one of several possible genes. ... The immune system is the organ system that protects an organism from outside biological influences. ... This stylistic schematic diagram shows a gene in relation to the double helix structure of DNA and to a chromosome (right). ... In biology the genome of an organism is the whole hereditary information of an organism that is encoded in the DNA (or, for some viruses, RNA). ... Growth hormone is a polypeptide hormone synthesised and secreted by the anterior pituitary gland which stimulates growth and cell reproduction in humans and other vertebrate animals. ... The Oncomouse or Harvard mouse is a type of laboratory mouse that has been genetically modified to carry a specific gene called an activated oncogene. ... An oncogene is a gene that can cause a cell to develop into a tumor cell, possibly resulting in cancer. ... When normal cells are damaged or old they undergo apoptosis; cancer cells, however, avoid apoptosis. ... The NMDA receptor (NMDAR) is an ionotropic receptor for glutamate (NMDA is a name of its selective specific agonist). ... A knockout mouse is a genetically engineered mouse one or more of whose genes have been made inoperable. ... A gene knockout is a genetically engineered organism that carries one or more genes in its chromosomes that has been made inoperative. ... Myostatin (fomerly known as Growth and Differentiation Factor 8) is a growth factor that limits muscle tissue growth, i. ... 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Cloning is the process of creating an identical copy of an original. ...

External links

Wikimedia Commons has more media related to:

Mus musculus

• Comprehensive house mouse information, including pictures, by the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology
• Biology of the Mouse, from the Louisiana Veterinary Medical Association
• Biology of Laboratory Rodents by David G. Besselsen
• Mus musculus, by the Museum of Texas Tech University
• Nature Mouse Special 2002
• Ensembl Mus musculus genome browser
• Taxonomy entry from NCBI, with comprehensive links to database information about Mus musculus
• Pictures, movies and applets showing the anatomy of Mus musculus
• Monica Lawlor: "A Home For A Mouse", Humane Innovations and Alternatives (Vol 8, 1994). Description of behavior and senses.
• 'Fancy Mice', includes much behavioral and physiological information
• Some information on muricide
• Vincenzo Covelli: "Guide to the Necropsy of the Mouse", pictures and explanation of a mouse autopsy
• Vocalizations during copulation