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Asked by anon-255051 to Richard on 19 May 2020.
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Richard Clayton answered on 19 May 2020:
Short answer: They are very similar in some respects (it can be hard to tell sometimes just by looking down the microscope), but there are important differences!
Longer answer: Cell types can be very similar between different animals. But the arrangement of these cells into different structures (tissues) can be different between humans and animals. For example, humans and mice share many different types of skin cells (keratinocytes, fibroblasts, etc.) that function in largely the same way. However, human skin is much thicker, and contains some structures that mouse skin doesn’t have (sweat glands, for example). The same is true for many different organs. Human and mouse brains both have nerve cells and supporting cells, but the overall brain structure is very different, not to mention the size!
The similarities allow us to ask questions in mice (or other animals) that could apply to humans (for example, how do skin cells react to UV light?). But the differences also limit what questions can be asked (for example, we cannot use mice to look at sweat glands, because they don’t exist in mice). Scientists must always remember the big differences that exist between animals and humans before drawing conclusions from their data.
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Comments
Alena commented on :
Jack, it might surprise you how similar we are, I mean mice and humans. This is why mice are used to try medicines in many studies. I work on malaria and mouse malaria (caused by parasites that only infect mice) has been a very good model to study the disease for years because we cannot dissect the liver of an infected person and for a long time we couldn’t experimentally infect people either. However, these studies in particular have taught us that as similar as we are, there are fundamental differences that are very important, particularly in the immune response. Our immune system reacts differently from mice and this is very important for the design of vaccines.