Research Projects (Third party funds)

INFRAFRONTIER

The European infrastructure for phenotyping and archiving of model mammalian genomes

Logo INFRAFRONTIERThe European infrastructure for phenotyping and archiving of model mammalian genomesMedically related Life Sciences use the mouse as a model system to understand the molecular basis of health and disease in humans. An essential task for Biomedical Sciences in the 21st century will be the functional analysis of mouse models for every gene in the mammalian genome. More than 30000 mutations in ES cells and numerous genetic reference populations consisting of thousands of inbred mouse strains with segregating genetic backgrounds will be engineered and thousands of mouse models for human diseases will become available over the next years by the collaborative efforts of the International Mouse Knockout Consortium.

The major bottlenecks identified by the user community will be proper characterization (Mouse Clinics), archiving and dissemination of mouse disease models to the research laboratories. The current capacities, governance structures and funding strategies of existing infrastructures will not be able to serve the upcoming urgent needs. Existing facilities across Europe can only offer capacity for the analysis and dissemination of a few hundred disease models per year.  

Thus it is imperative to organize and establish now an efficient distributed infrastructure for the phenotyping, archiving and dissemination of mouse models on a well-concerted, large-scale and pan-European level. This will be a prerequisite for maintaining Europe's leading role in the functional annotation of the mouse genome. Infrafrontier will guarantee the accessibility of mouse models and will be essential to facilitate their exploitation.

Infrafrontier is an Integrated Project of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, comprising 7 work packages, 9 countries and 14 partners.

WP5 – Draft Engineering Specifications

Prof. Dr. Klaus Schughart, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research

Objectives

1) Development of detailed specifications for designing and building or upgrading of mouse holding and breeding facilities, archiving and distribution facilities and mouse phenotyping facilities.

2) To document these specifications in a formal publication.

 

Partners

 

Ministries and research councils

Leader

Groups

There are no results

Coordinator

Prof. Dr. Martin Hrabé de Angelis, Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg/München, Germany

Funding agency

EU-Projects

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