News
Universal Cre & Flp deleters
December 2011
In order to facilitate the use of the new mutant resource developed in the mouse, the ICS has developed two new Cre and Flp deleter models.
AFSTAL Grant
November 2011
The AFSTAL offers a € 3000 prize to reward work published by a researcher who has worked to improve science and technology on laboratory animals or for the promotion of the 3Rs.
Job position available
October 2011
The Genetic Engineering and Model Validation Department recruits for an open-ended contract an ES Cells Culture and Differentiation Service Head Associate.
IMPC Launch
September 2011
The Institut Clinique de la Souris (ICS, Head Y. Hérault) as a founder of PHENOMIN, the national infrastructure for Health and Biology, laureate of the Investment for the future in France, with the Intragene Resource Center (IRC/TAAM, Head Y. Hérault) in Orléans and the Centre for Immunophenomics in Marseille (CIPHE, Head B. Malissen), will contribute to the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC) initiative inside the European Infrafrontier network to establish a new reference in mammalian genetics and in phenogenomics.
The IMPC is building a library of mammalian gene function which will describe the function of every gene in the mouse genome. Around 99 per cent of the genes in a mouse have an equivalent gene in humans. By understanding the function of all the genes within the mouse, scientists can improve their understanding of the role that genes play in human diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.
The IMPC programme will allow researchers from across the world to easily access all of the resources and information created by the programme on "knockout mice" – that is, mice in which scientists have inactivated (or "knocked out") a gene in order to discover what that gene does. This will substantially shorten the time between basic research and clinical application. Dr Mark Moore, IMPC Executive Director, explains: "We want to characterise each line of mice broadly with no assumptions about what the gene may be doing."
"If you think of the function of a gene as a needle in a haystack, we're removing the haystack so scientists can see what the needle does" he added.
The IMPC is a worldwide consortium comprising fifteen research institutions along with national funders from six countries, including the Medical Research Council (MRC) Harwell (UK), the National Institutes of Health (US), the Wellcome Trust (UK), the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton (UK), Helmholtz Zentrum München, German Mouse Clinic (Germany), Toronto Centre for Phenogenomics (Canada), Institut Clinique de la Souris (France), Australian Phenomics Network (Australia), RIKEN BioResource Centre (Japan), CNR Monterotondo (Italy), Baylor College of Medicine (US), University of California Davis (US), Charles River Laboratories (US), Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (US), the Jackson Laboratory (US), Genome Canada (Canada), and MARC - Nanjing University (China). This strong international partnership hopes to increase its membership as the programme moves forward.
"Our drive is to understand the role of genes in disease and use that understanding to improve healthcare," explains Dr Bill Skarnes, Senior Investigator at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "The cells and DNA resources we have developed for IMPC have already proved their value in identifying genes involved in a form of anaemia. The integrated resources delivered by IMPC will make a real difference to researchers' work around the world."
Funding has been awarded to members of the consortium by a number of national funding agencies. Recently, several members of the consortium have been awarded US $110m over five years by the NIH to work on the project; which includes the Knockout Mouse Phenotyping Project 2 (KOMP2) and MPI2. The first phase of this ten-year project will knock out 5000 mouse genes and describe their physical characteristics or phenotypes.
Each mutant will pass through a series of examinations similar to the examinations patients might experience at a doctor's surgery or in hospital to diagnose their condition. All members of the IMPC will use standard agreed procedures to perform the biological investigations and the data will be deposited in a single international database. The set of tests is designed to give information on human disease, such as heart disease, diabetes, and deafness, and the results will determine if that gene has a part to play in those diseases. The mice and the data generated from them will be freely available to the scientific community.
Dr Francis Collins, Director of the NIH, says: "The addition of detailed clinical information for each knockout mouse line will be a boon to disease researchers who want to determine the function of genes and improve mouse models of human disease."
Professor Steve Brown, Director of MRC Harwell and Chair of the IMPC Steering Committee says: "The launch of the IMPC represents an outstanding example of international cooperation in the biomedical sciences. IMPC is an unprecedented and unique international biological research endeavor that brings together diverse expertise and facilities to tackle the enormous challenges of understanding the relationship between gene and disease. This latest funding boost from NIH along with the funding available from other funding agencies means the first phase of the project is on track."
Professor Martin Hrabé de Angelis of Helmholtz Zentrum München and coordinator of Infrafrontier, a world class pan European research consortium for systemic phenotyping and archiving of mouse models, says: "This is an outstanding and unique opportunity to leverage existing know how and infrastructures in different continents by running a so far unmatched global programme to unravel gene functions of human diseases."
Data generated by the IMPC will be used by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to speed-up the development pipeline of new drugs. Dr Tom Weaver, Director of the MRC Mary Lyon Centre which is one of the IMPC production and phenotyping centres, explains: "There are literally hundreds if not thousands of drug targets that have yet to be discovered. The application of mouse genetics in combination with phenotypic analysis is recognized as an essential method for identifying and validating drug targets and drugable pathways. They will serve as tools to understand the mechanisms of action of drugs in vivo, and efficacy testing prior to expensive clinical trials."
Underpinning the IMPC project has been a lengthy period of planning and technical preparations. A fundamental component of this has been the planning for a data coordination centre (DCC) which will allow unrestricted public access to IMPC data. Dr Ann-Marie Mallon, Head of Informatics at MRC Harwell explained: "We are committed to make data from IMPC public in an accurate, timely, and intuitive manner to ensure any institution or researcher around the world can access this data and the genetically modified mice".
Dr Paul Flicek, of EMBL-EBI, added: "The open resources created by IMPC will be integrated with many other molecular databases at EMBL-EBI and elsewhere, and benefit from advanced search functionality. This will ensure that researchers can make use of detailed data and high-level summaries of mouse phenotypes and other relevant biological information - for example human disease associations - well into the future."
SYSGENET GRP Survey
July 2011
SYSGENET organized a survey on the Mouse Genetics Reference Populations available in Europe: their use, the phenotyping, the needs ... Please answer the survey within the next two weeks (until July 25th).
CELPHEDIA
April 2011
The CELPHEDIA website is online. CELPHEDIA (Creation, Breeding, Phenotyping, Distribution and Archiving of vertebrate models) is a national large scale infrastructure Network.
Offre d'emploi technicien
April 2011
L'ICS recrute actuellement en CDD (durée de 6 mois) un(e) Technicien(ne) animalier(ère) en gestion de lignées transgéniques.
PHENOMIN - Investissements d'Avenir
March 2011
With the new project PHENOMIN, the goal of the ICS is to give birth to a national infrastructure specialized in development, analysis and conservation of mice models.
CNRS Training preliminary program
March 2011
Preliminary program of CNRS training course on genetically modified mice models is now available for consultation.
Access to Genetic Engineering offer
March 2011
The decscription of our models is now available. Click on the "Generate" button on the main page to discover our Genetic Engineering and Model Validation offer.
Training course
February 2011
From March 29 to 31, the ICS organizes under the auspices of CNRS a training course on genetically modified mice models.
Job position available
January 2011
The Genetic Engineering and Model Validation Department recruits for an initial fixed 2 months contract a Technical Report Editor.
ICS Cre Zoo resource
November 2010
Our CreERT2 resource is now available to the scientific community. Fusion protein CreERT2 mediates spatio-temporal control of somatic mutagenesis.
EMMAservice
October 2010
Transnational Access (TA) activity of the EMMAservice project: Free of charge access to EMMA mouse mutant resources.