NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Jackson Laboratory announced yesterday that it has received a five-year, $28.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue work on the second phase of the Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP2), an initiative focused on phenotyping a genome-wide collection of mouse knockouts generated by the International Knockout Mouse Consortium.
In 2011, KOMP2 members — including the Jackson Lab, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of California, Davis — received $110 million from the NIH to kick off KOMP2. That initial five-year effort involved generating and phenotyping approximately 2,500 knockout mice lines.
"Mice and humans share approximately 20,000 genes but scientists have little or no data for more than half of these genes," Jackson Lab researcher and KOMP2 investigator Robert Braun said in a statement. "Deleting individual genes in this way provides valuable clues to the genes' function."
Under the newest grant program, the Jackson Lab will work with two research consortia led by UC Davis and Baylor generating and phenotyping additional knockout mouse lines. According to Braun, this work will take advantage of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, which wasn't available for the previous KOMPs.
Jackson Lab researchers will also assess the body weight and composition, as well as metabolic, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive parameters for each of the new mouse lines at several age points.
The mice and the data generated from KOMP2 will be made available to the broader scientific community, the Jackson Lab said.