Comment in:
The knockout mouse project.
Austin CP, Battey JF, Bradley A, Bucan M, Capecchi M, Collins FS, Dove WF, Duyk G, Dymecki S, Eppig JT, Grieder FB, Heintz N, Hicks G, Insel TR, Joyner A, Koller BH, Lloyd KC, Magnuson T, Moore MW, Nagy A, Pollock JD, Roses AD, Sands AT, Seed B, Skarnes WC, Snoddy J, Soriano P, Stewart DJ, Stewart F, Stillman B, Varmus H, Varticovski L, Verma IM, Vogt TF, von Melchner H, Witkowski J, Woychik RP, Wurst W, Yancopoulos GD, Young SG, Zambrowicz B.
National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Building 31, Room 4B09, 31 Center Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA. austinc@mail.nih.gov
Mouse knockout technology provides a powerful means of elucidating gene function in vivo, and a publicly available genome-wide collection of mouse knockouts would be significantly enabling for biomedical discovery. To date, published knockouts exist for only about 10% of mouse genes. Furthermore, many of these are limited in utility because they have not been made or phenotyped in standardized ways, and many are not freely available to researchers. It is time to harness new technologies and efficiencies of production to mount a high-throughput international effort to produce and phenotype knockouts for all mouse genes, and place these resources into the public domain.
PMID: 15340423 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]