Murine models for human diseases.

This article is a bibliographic review concerning mouse mutations, spontane ous, induced or genetically engineered, as models of human genetic diseases . Since the beginning of the last century, mouse models have been instrumen tal in the understanding of the pathogenesis of many diseases and designing of new therapies. A number of recent technological advances in embryo mani pulation and many large-scale mutagenesis screens will dramatically increas e the availability of new mouse models in the near future. In the "post-gen omic" era, mouse mutants will have a significant role as a model system for functional genome analysis of the upcoming whole-genome information of the human and mouse genomes projects.