Research history
The history of mouse genetics might have begun in the 1860s if Gregor Mendel had not been forbidden to breed mice within the monastery and, thus, carried out his classic genetic studies with sweet peas. Rather, French geneticist Lucien Cuénot was the first to demonstrate Mendelian inheritance in mammals using the inheritance of coat colors in mice (1902). In 1903 William Castle at the Bussey Institute at Harvard also published a paper on coat color genetics in mice. Castle’s student, Clarence Cook (“C.C.”) Little, is credited with conceiving of and creating the first inbred strain of laboratory mice (DBA, named for its coat color genes: dilute, brown, nonagouti) to unravel the genetics of cancer. At the Bussey, Little also founded the C57/C58 family of strains and went on to found The Jackson Laboratory in 1929.
Mouse fanciers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Asia and, later, Europe and America were the origin of most laboratory mice of today. Because of their origins in the mouse fancy trade, laboratory mouse strains are a genetic mix of four different subspecies: Mus musculus musculus (eastern Europe), Mus musculus domesticus (western Europe), Mus musculus castaneus (Southeast Asia), and Mus musculus molossinus (Japan).
Many inbred strains derive from Miss Abbie Lathrop, a mouse fancier who bred and sold mice in Granby, Massachusetts, from ~1900 to her death in 1918. She carried out breeding experiments in collaboration with several scientists, including William Castle and later C.C. Little at the Bussey Institute at Harvard. Miss Lathrop’s breeding records and notebooks, including such observations, are preserved in the library at The Jackson Laboratory.
