“’I’ll promise you anything you like if only you’ll bring me back the ball.’ But she thought: What nonsense this silly frog is talking! It sits in the water and croaks with the other frogs, how can it ever have a human companion?”
- Extract from ‘The Frog King’
- Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm.

“HAVING completed the sequencing of the human genome - as well as those of other vertebrates such as the mouse and the chicken - researchers in functional genomics are now trying to understand exactly when and where during human development individual genes turn on or off and what exactly they do.

To answer these questions, researchers are using computational methods to compare the genomes of different species to find common gene sequences (strings of nucleotides and the building blocks of DNA). Although it may seem that looking to frogs and mice for answers to questions about the human genome is a leap, it is not a very long one. Biologists reason that if a gene (and its function) is the same - or has been “conserved” - between a frog and a mouse, whose last common ancestor lived 340 million years ago, chances are very good that the gene will also be conserved between the mouse and the human, whose last common ancestor lived only 75 million years ago.”
- Maurina S. Sherman
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.