Mighty mouse

[摘要] Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, with a capacity to house thousands of mouse lines, the institute has the ambition of becoming the world's largest warehouse for knockout mice, in which individual genes have been selectively deleted, or 'knocked out', from the genome. There are about 25,000 mouse genes, so the scale of the project is enormous and the cost is astronomical. The Sanger Institute is part of an international effort to accomplish this feat. The mouse mutagenesis schemes, Conditional Knockout Mouse Mutagenesis (EUCOMM) and the Canada-based North American Conditional Knockout Mouse Mutagenesis (NorCOMM) programmes were launched in October 2005. They were joined a few months ago by the Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP), which was spearheaded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). A further project, the European Mouse Disease Clinic (EUMODIC) will be launched February, 2007, for creating another 300 knockout mice and analysing 600 mouse lines in total.