Sheep

Exploiting ovine immunology to improve the relevance of biomedical models

“…Mice have been the standard biomedical model for humans but the immunological relevance of mice for humans has been questioned due to differences in a whole range of innate and adaptive immune parameters ( Mestas and Hughes, 2004 ). It is currently impossible to draw any such comparisons with sheep as the range of probes, tools and reagents is nowhere near extensive enough, although the improving annotation of the sheep genome along with the ability to link genetic profiles with specific traits will advance this ( Bidwell et al, 2014 ). A further difficulty for comparative immunology studies is the variation in immune-related genes which are among the most diverse in the genome ( Barreiro and Quintana-Murci, 2010 ).…”