Question: Have you made any big discoveries?

Adam Hargreaves answered on 12 Jun 2017:

I have, although how “big” you’d call it I guess is up to personal opinion!

I recently worked on the Sand rat which is a species of gerbil that lives in deserts in North Africa and the Middle East. People have been interested in this animal since the 1960’s because if you feed it the normal food you would feed to a mouse, most of them become obese and develop type 2 diabetes. Because of that they’ve been used for many years as a model animal for human type 2 diabetes research.
Whilst nobody really knows exactly why they get diabetes, a few studies looked for a gene called Pdx1, and they couldn’t find it, not just in sand rats, but in any species of gerbil. This gene was particularly interesting because it is needed to develop a pancreas and also to express insulin. Any negative effects to either of these processes usually leads to diabetes, so it looked like we were onto a winner. However, a complete lack of Pdx1 usually means you don’t form a pancreas and die, so how on earth are gerbils alive?
I managed to find the Pdx1 gene in gerbils (after a lot of frustration. I can’t express just how frustrating this was!), which was hidden because it has become incredibly mutated. In fact, we’re pretty confident it is the most mutated version of this gene out of the entire animal kingdom. This might explain why sand rats (and possibly other gerbils) get diabetes.
Very happy to have found it, the months of hard work and banging my head on my desk paid off!