The NOD mouse, which spontaneously develops type 1 diabetes, is a valuable animal model that is used extensively in research exploring the etiology, prevention, and treatment of this disease. It is a vital research tool for testing promising prevention and treatment strategies at the preclinical level.
The Sanger Institute sequenced the complete NOD BAC library and used this resource to complete a physical map of the BAC clones. As a next step, they plan to sequence the 200,000 clones from the Pieter de Jong library (Children's Hospital, Oakland CA). These sequences will be aligned with those from the most recent version of the normal C57B1/6 (B6) mouse strain (a non-diabetic mouse strain) in an effort to identify single nucleotide differences between NOD mouse clone end sequences and the B6 mouse genome. Investigators at the Sanger Institute will use this sequencing information to identify and map candidate genes. Such information will guide efforts to isolate genes that contribute to the development of type 1 diabetes in humans.
This research was conducted as part of the Immune Tolerance Network, which is jointly funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Disorders (both part of the National Institutes of Health) and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.