New mouse genomics consortium. (NIEH News).

The NIEHS announced on 3 May 2001 that five research centers comprising the Comparative Mouse Genomics Centers Consortium have been selected to develop mouse lines with genetic variations that may be key to understanding the effects of environmental stressors on the body. The mice, protocols, assays, assessment criteria, and data generated through projects using them will be made available to scientists around the world to help determine how such gene variations make some individuals more sensitive or resistant to environmental exposures. The centers will develop new mouse models to study the processes that repair environment-damaged DNA and regulate cell life cycles. The consortium is part of the Environmental Genome Project, begun by the NIEHS in late 1997 to identify genes and alleles that affect individual response to environmental exposures.

Pooling the established resources of this diverse group of scientists will ease the transfer of emerging materials, data, and technology and is intended to encourage discoveries that will help scientists better understand the complex interaction between the environment and human health. "This is a very comprehensive program, with over ninety investigators based at the centers," says Jose Velazquez, the NIEHS program director for the centers. Information gathered through research at these centers could not only help scientists better predict health risks to sensitive individuals, but could also help policy makers draft public and environmental health regulations that have a more scientific basis and that are more cost-effective to better protect those affected.

The centers will be governed by a steering committee responsible for providing general direction and guidance to consortium programs. A main focus of the centers will be to develop technologies such as three-dimensional protein imaging, which could be used to predict the function of the variations; whole-mouse imaging using PET scanning, which could more quickly detect tumor formation; microarray gene expression analysis; proteomics; and a whole new suite of bioinformatics tools to integrate the emerging data. The consortium will also explore modeling strategies, including in vitro DNA variant assessment (which is used to determine which allelic variants to model) and construction of transgenic vectors, using state-of-the-art molecular biological approaches for gene targeting.

One major goal of this project, says Velazquez, will be the launch of a new bioinformatics Web site in late 2001 that will integrate the available gene and protein data for approximately 200 genes that function to repair environmental damage and regulate cell life cycles. In addition, the consortium's Web site, which should be available to the public by November 2001, will display the models under development and bioinformatics tools to mine the available data. Both sites will be available through the Environmental Genome Project home page, located at http://www.niehs.nih.gov/envgenom/home.htm.

The participating centers are The Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University (the Bronx, New York), the University of Washington (Seattle), the University of Cincinnati (Ohio), the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center (Smithville). Over the next five years, the centers will receive $5-6 million in grants per year. Each center will focus on separate sets of genes determined to play a role in aging and the development of cancer and other diseases.