MCW Awarded $8M to Fund Rat Genome Database

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Medical College of Wisconsin said today it received a four-year, $8 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to fund the rat genome database. 

The database was created in 1999 to collect, consolidate, and integrate data from genetic and genomic research into rat models and to make the data widely available to researchers. It also contains complete files of rat, human, and mouse genes, and files on specific animal strains, MCW said, adding the database has about 4.5 million functional data annotations for rat, human, and mouse genes, and information on 500,000 disease-specific annotations. 

The curated information is free to users, and in 2014 more than 180,000 users in 190 countries accessed the database for scientific research data, the college said. 

In total the database has received more than $35 million in funding.