Contents
News from NCRR
People, Awards, Grants, and New Developments
NIH Funds Repository for Knockout Mouse Project
NIH has awarded $4.8 million to the University of California, Davis, and Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute to establish and maintain a repository of up to 8,500 strains of mice in which certain genes have been made inoperable, or “knocked out.”
The grant is the final component of the NIH Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP), a trans-NIH initiative designed to increase the availability of genetically altered mice and related materials. The more than $50 million KOMP created the mouse embryonic stem cell lines—the types of cells that give rise to knockout mice—in which 8,500 different genes were knocked out.
The newly established repository will make knockout mice available to researchers as live mouse lines, embryonic stem cell clones, frozen embryos, and sperm. Researchers then will be able to study the mice to develop better models of many human diseases.
NCRR, the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have funded the four-year grant to establish and operate the new repository. Previous KOMP awards established a data coordination center to track knockout mouse production and supported efforts to improve methods for creating knockout lines.
Information on the new repository and KOMP is available at www.komp.org.
