What are the advantages of making the KOMP resource?A significant number of the 25,000 mouse genes (about 3200) have been knocked out and published. However, many published mice are not readily available to the scientific community (e.g., only 740 unique genes are represented as targeted mutations in the International Mouse Strain Resource). The reason for the restricted availability of these mice is that they have been generated either in individual laboratories or as commercial efforts, and not as a public resource. The limited availability of the mice force a redundancy in production – a single mouse gene is knocked out on average 2.5 times – which presents a large financial burden for the entire biomedical research community. Collaborating with existing efforts, nationally and internationally, as well as centralizing the process of making new mutants will capitalize on efficiencies of scale. This will save time and dollars down the road; insure that mice are made available for researchers at relatively low costs and in a timely fashion; completely mutagenize the whole genome more quickly than in the current one-off fashion; and possibly create a platform for normalizing down stream phenotypic analyses. No longer would a researcher need to invest large sums of grant dollars into generating these reagents, nor run the risk of losing one to two years of research effort if the attempt fails, but could invest the savings in detailed characterization of the mutant mouse and other data generating experiments. |
