Inspired by the civil rights movement in America, Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men comic universe, a world in which some people, known as mutants, were born with a gene that gave them special abilities but also often made them look different than typical humans.
Homozygote mutants were born in the expected Mendelian ratios and displayed no abnormalities in growth or development.
Because very few runt mutants were born and most of them died soon after birth, all the subsequent analyses were done with non-runt mutants.
In both genotypes, palate shelf elevation fails to occur at E14.5 and all Gad1 and Viaat mutants were born with cleft secondary palates (Fig. 3A-H and data not shown).
As for highly dreaded congenital malformations and popular myths of two-headed animals and children, it should be mentioned that mutants were born before the Chernobyl accident.
Similar to TRF2 Δ/Δ -K5-Cre mice, TRF2 Δ/Δ -K5-Cre p53 −/− double mutant were born at submendelian ratios and newborn mice died immediately after birth, indicating occurrence of embryonic lethality (Fig. 3C,D).
Indeed, this seems to be the case for mutants that are born large, since in the overwhelming majority of those mutants the mean size was also large (ρ = 0.83; see Figure 3).
In contrast, mutants that are born small are more likely to progress slower in the cell cycle.
Such a putative delay is consistent with the data in Figure 3, showing that mutants that are born "large" will likely stay large.
