CHAPEL HILL -- The National Institutes of Health has selected the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as one of two Regional Mutant Mouse Resource Centers in the nation. The new center will receive a grant of $660,000 a year over five years.
UNC and the University of California at Davis will facilitate more widespread use of mouse models in basic and translational research throughout the U.S. Such models have revolutionized the 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 Dr. Terry Van Dyke, professor of biochemistry at UNC-CH 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 UNC 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 moneys also will go toward maintaining and distributing mutant mouse strains.
Note to media: Contact Dr. Terry Van Dyke at 919-962-2415; email:tvdlab@med.unc.edu
UNC School of Medicine contact: Leslie H. Lang, 919-843-9687; email: llang@med.unc.edu