NEW YORK, Oct. 26 (GenomeWeb News) - The National Institute of Environmental Health Services has awarded $13.2 million to Perlegen to map the DNA of 15 mouse strains believed to be important to human research, the company said yesterday.
The 2-year funding will pay for approximately 55 percent of the project, Perlegen said. The remainder of the funding, approximately $10.8 million, will be provided by unidentified non-government sources.
The initiative, dubbed the "Resequencing Project," will launch the NIEHS' Center for Rodent Genetics. The center joins other NIEHS initiatives, such as the Environmental Genome Project and the National Center for Toxicogenomics, as "extensions of the institute's ongoing research to understand the genetic basis for differences in response to drugs and other environmental factors," NIEHS said in a statement.
Perlegen will use Affymetrix's whole-wafer, high-density oligonucleotide arrays to analyze the approximately 2.4-billion-base-pair genomes in order to identify SNPs and other genetic differences, Perlegen said. Perlegen is a spin-off of Affymetrix.