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The National Institutes of Health has selected Carolina as one of two
Regional Mutant Mouse Resource Centers in the nation.
The new center will receive a grant of $660,000 annually over five years.
Carolina and the University of California at Davis will facilitate more
widespread use of mouse models in basic and translational research throughout
the country.
Such models have revolutionized scientists' ability to probe mammalian
biology and disease and have become a valuable resource. The new centers will
expand the already strained capabilities of Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor,
Maine, to characterize, maintain and distribute an ever-growing array of mutant
mouse models to the research community.
"One of the problems is that people can generate lots of models, but these
won't be accessible without a repository where they can be quality controlled,
checked out and distributed," said Terry Van Dyke, professor of biochemistry at
the School of Medicine and the mouse center's principal investigator.
"The NIH decided to fund additional nodes that would work with Jackson
labs to bring in more mutant mouse strains from different investigators and do
a limited amount of characterization on them and then make them available on a
small scale to investigators," she added. "We'll also monitor which ones are in
high demand and send those to Bar Harbor for distribution on a larger
scale."
The grant to Carolina also contains a research component for developing
improvements in mouse-cloning procedures. Genotyping and cloning experiments
will be conducted in the Animal Models Core at the medical school. The research
money also will go toward maintaining and distributing mutant mouse
strains.
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