BRAIN MOLECULAR ANATOMY PROJECT: GENE DISCOVERY

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The precise spatio-temporal expression of genes during development is critical for determining the structure and function of the brain. The determination of the profile of genes expressed in various brain cell types during brain development and altered during pathophysiological states will provide valuable information that will contribute to greater understanding of mental health and the improved diagnosis, treatment, and eventually prevention of serious brain disorders. Brain Molecular Anatomy Project (BMAP), which is an inter- disciplinary, multi-institute effort led by NIMH and NINDS, aims to establish state-of-the-art technologies and informatics systems to decipher the molecular anatomy of the brain and consists of the gene discovery and gene expression analysis phases. The gene discovery phase, which aims to catalog the repertoire of genes that are expressed by different kinds of nervous system cells at different developmental stages, begins with an effort to identify genes expressed in adult mouse brain using strain C57BL6J. The contract will accomplish the following: (1) to construct individually tagged non-normalized and normalized cDNA libraries from 11 brain regions; (2) to generate 11 serially subtracted normalized libraries increasingly enriched for the mRNAs of the complex frequency class (rare mRNAs); (3) determine sequences of over 75,000 3 ESTs from serially subtracted libraries, and construct a non-redundant collection of > 20,000 unique ESTs for the development of a "mouse brain UNIGENE set". Individual cDNA clones and libraries, unigene sets, and associated data will provide invaluable resources for the scientific community upon which future functional studies in the nervous systems can be based.