Development of mouse mutant resources for functional analyses of human diseases - Enhancing the translation of research into innovation.

The mouse shows great similarities in development, physiology and biochemistry to humans, which makes it a key model for research into human disease. The major challenges for mouse functional genomics in the 21st century are to:

• Develop a series of mutant alleles for every gene in the mouse genome
• Determine the phenotypic consequences of each mutation
• Identify mouse models for the complete disease spectrum in humans

To further develop and exploit the emerging mouse mutant resource, mouse models must be preserved and made available to the European biomedical research community. To this effect, the Infrafrontier-I3 project brings together the leading European centers for systemic phenotyping of mouse mutants and the European Mouse Mutant Archive network. The Infafrontier-I3 partners aim to meet the future challenges presented by phenotyping, archiving and disseminating mouse models in the ERA as follows:

• Contribute to resource development by archiving of 1215 new mouse mutant lines
• Provide free of charge Transnational Access to mouse production and 1st line phenotyping capacities
• Offer a specialized axenic service to produce, maintain and to distribute germ-free mice
• Provide user friendly accession of Infrafrontier services, extensive manual data curation and cross referencing with other mouse database
• Improve user services by developing novel phenotyping and cryopreservation SOPs and by refining innovative research instrumentation
• Engage with the user community using a wide range of PR activities, a dedicated user meeting and an industry liaison workshop
• Offer state of the art cryopreservation and phenotyping training courses
• Benchmark Infrafrontier services with other major repositories

The comprehensive physical and data resources that will be generated by Infrafrontier-I3 will contribute to link basic biomedical research to medical applications and thereby drive innovation and support the Europe 2020 Strategy.