COURTESY OF ANNA-KARIN GERDIN, THE SANGER INSTITUTE
Researchers investigating genetic variation and its contribution to phenotypic differences have gained a windfall of data, described in two Nature papers out today (September 14). A collaboration involving more than forty scientists from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States have published the sequences of 17 different mouse genomes, including 13 of the most common lab strains and 4 wild-derived strains. The breadth of the data, publicly available, promises to aid research tracing the link between DNA sequence and phenotype, and shed light on the genetic underpinnings of disease susceptibility and species evolution.
The new sequences are “eminently more powerful than previous mouse data,” said David Threadgill, a geneticist at North Carolina State University who was not involved with the project. Although the first ...
