Maximising the potential of wild-derived laboratory mouse strains for medical research

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Our key aim is to explore the relationship between genetic and medically relevant human disease phenotypes. One way to do this is to assess the genetic differences between long-established laboratory mouse strains. Wild-derived mouse strains display many important disease phenotypes such as resistance to various forms of cancer (e.g. liver, lung, and skin cancer), bacterial and viral infection. However, the foundation for studying the genetic differences in these strains is having accurate genome sequences. In this project, we will first generate genome sequences for the most commonly used wild-derived mouse strains and then use these sequences and knowledge of the gene structures to determine the genetic cause of observed phenotypic differences between these strains. By combining sequence and phenotypic data we will determine whether sequence variants are likely to be contributing to disease susceptibility.