Scientists accidentally made a mouse grow legs in place of genitals

(SCIENCE ALERT) – Turning off a gene early in mouse development led researchers to end up with an accidental six-legged embryonic mammal. This strange result took the spinal cord research of developmental biologists Anastasiia Lozovska and Moisés Mallo and their colleagues at Portugal’s Gulbenkian Science Institute in a new direction.

“I didn’t choose the project, the project chose me,” Mallo told Sara Reardon at Nature News.

Get the hottest, most important news stories on the Internet – delivered FREE to your inbox as soon as they break! Take just 30 seconds and sign up for WND’s Email News Alerts!

The team compared 10 to 17-day-old mouse embryos with and without functioning versions of the gene in question, Tgfbr1, which codes for the Tgfbr1 receptor protein.