EMMA—mouse mutant resources for the international scientific community

The laboratory mouse is the premier animal model for studying human disease and thousands of mutants have been identified or produced, most recently through gene-specific mutagenesis approaches. High throughput strategies by the International Knockout Mouse Consortium (IKMC) are producing mutants for all protein coding genes. Generating a knock-out line involves huge monetary and time costs so capture of both the data describing each mutant alongside archiving of the line for distribution to future researchers is critical. The European Mouse Mutant Archive (EMMA) is a leading international network infrastructure for archiving and worldwide provision of mouse mutant strains. It operates in collaboration with the other members of the Federation of International Mouse Resources (FIMRe), EMMA being the European component. Additionally EMMA is one of four repositories involved in the IKMC, and therefore the current figure of 1700 archived lines will rise markedly. The EMMA database gathers and curates extensive data on each line and presents it through a user-friendly website. A BioMart interface allows advanced searching including integrated querying with other resources e.g. Ensembl. Other resources are able to display EMMA data by accessing our Distributed Annotation System server. EMMA database access is publicly available at http://www.emmanet.org

Blastocyst genotyping for quality control of mouse mutant archives: An ethical and economical approach.

With the advent of modern developmental biology and molecular genetics, the scientific community has generated thousands of newly genetically altered strains of laboratory mice with the aim of elucidating gene function. To this end, a large group of Institutions which form the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium is generating and phenotyping a knockout mouse strain for each of the ~20,000 protein-coding genes using the mutant ES cell resource produced by the International Knockout Mouse Consortium. These strains are made available to the research community via public repositories, mostly as cryopreserved sperm or embryos. To ensure the quality of this frozen resource there is a requirement that for each strain the frozen sperm/embryos are proven able to produce viable mutant progeny, before the live animal resource is removed from cages. Given the current requirement to generate live pups to demonstrate their mutant genotype, this quality control check necessitates the use and generation of many animals and requires considerable time, cage space, technical and economic resources. Here, we describe a simple and efficient method of genotyping pre-implantation stage blastocysts with significant ethical and economic advantages especially beneficial for current and future large-scale mouse mutagenesis projects