Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC)

The goal of the Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC), a trans-NIH initiative, is to provide full-length open reading frame (FL-ORF) clones for human, mouse, and rat genes. The MGC recently organized an international consortium of seven participants to create “expression-ready” clones for all Homo sapiens genes, which can be used by the research community for expression of proteins for large-scale proteomic analyses.

In 2005, the project added the cow cDNAs generated by Genome Canada. Alternative methods based on gene-specific amplification have recently been developed to target the recovery of human and mouse genes absent from the MGC collection.

To learn more about the Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC), visit http://mgc.nci.nih.gov/.

MGC infrastructure and protocols are also being applied to two other gene collection projects:

• Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis (XGC)
• Danio rerio (ZGC)

The XGC is an NIH initiative that supports the production of cDNA libraries, clones, and 5'/3' sequences to provide a set of full-length (open reading frame) sequences and cDNA clones of expressed genes for Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis. All resources generated by the XGC are publicly accessible to the biomedical research community. For more information about the XGC, visit http://xgc.nci.nih.gov/.

The ZGC is an NIH initiative that supports the production of cDNA libraries, clones, and sequences to provide a complete set of full-length (open reading frame) sequences and cDNA clones of expressed genes for zebrafish. All resources generated by the ZGC are publicly accessible to the biomedical research community. For more information about the ZGC, visit http://zgc.nci.nih.gov/.

To view a brief summary of the status of the Mammalian Gene Collection, click here.