Question: what do you like about gerbils?

Adam Hargreaves answered on 19 Jun 2017:

Hi 758actj46,
They’re so weird!
I started working on them because one species called the sand rat gets diabetes if you feed it the same food as you would normally give to a mouse. These are gerbils which live in the desert, they eat a plant which has leaves that are a lot like salty cardboard, and they never ever drink water in the wild.
For many years scientists thought that sand rats got diabetes because they were missing a gene called Pdx1, because nobody could find it. This gene is very important for making a pancreas during development, and also for expressing insulin to help keep blood sugar levels under control. Having said that, any animal which doesn’t have Pdx1 gene usually dies, so how on earth are these things managing to survive?! After a lot of work I managed to find Pdx1 in the sand rat, and it has become completely mutated which is why other scientists struggled to find it. It looks like the gene still manages to work, just not as well as it should, which we think is why they get diabetes.
Added onto that, it isn’t just Pdx1 which has become completely mutated in sand rats, there are another 87 genes around it which have also gone the same way. This is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in a genome before!