Some Mice Have Become Immune to Poison Through Natural but Highly Unusual Evolution
House Mouse With Glove Rama via Wikimedia Commons Mice are great (see: high-endurance mice, mice with lab-grown artificial organs, Israeli bomb-sniffing security mice) but sometimes you just don't want them in your apartment/house/bakery/kitchen/New York subway station, which is why you might buy some warfarin, a common rodent poison. Some mice, however, have developed an immunity to that poison through highly unusual means: horizontal gene transfer, a kind of evolution-through-hybridization that's only been seen before in microbes. As reported in the current issue of Current Biology, mice in a German bakery were discovered to have absolutely no reaction to the use of even a particularly nasty form of warfarin, which is usually a kiss of death for our friend the house mouse. A genetic analysis showed that the mice in that kitchen actually had a large chunk of DNA from the Algerian mouse, a separate (though closely related) species from the house...