NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – ATCC announced today that it has signed a cooperative research and development agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to validate short tandem repeat markers for PCR-based authentication of mouse cell lines.
Under the terms of the three-year collaboration, ATCC will partner with NIST to establish a mouse cell line authentication consortium, and will provide DNA from at least 50 cell lines for a PCR-based assay for validation studies. NIST will evaluate the performance of the assay and decide whether modifications are necessary. NIST data will go into a public database containing mouse cell line short tandem repeat profiles.
"Mouse cell lines are commonly used to study human genes and disease but are frequently misidentified or contaminated, invalidating experimental results," Maryellen de Mars, senior director for ATCC's Standards Resource Center, said in a statement. "Current authentication methods lack the resolution to differentiate between individual mouse [cell lines] at the subspecies-level. This multiplex PCR assay will be the first of its kind to provide a unique short tandem repeat profile for each individual mouse cell line."
This is the latest partnership deal for ATCC, which recently signed a licensing agreement with the Broad Institute for CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology.