Large mice on small islands

House mice from the Faroe Islands are among the largest mice in the world. Researchers at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory try to understand how they come to settle in the Faroe and how they have evolved island gigantism so rapidly in the last thousand years by sieving through their genomes. Hidden in the tapestry of the mouse DNA is a complex history resulting from hundreds of years of mixing between mouse subtypes. Efforts are now underway to uncover the genetics of island gigantism.