A mouse embryo with 6 legs was obtained by a group of researchers at the Gulbenkian Scientific Institute in Oeiras, Portugal. The extra pair of legs grew in place of the genitals, demonstrating that a single gene is responsible for the development of these apparently very different structures.
The authors of the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, now hope to understand whether the same gene and the protein it codes for are also involved in other processes, such as metastasis in the case of cancer.