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

我们的主要目的是探索遗传和医学相关的人类疾病表型之间的关系。一种方法是评估长期建立的实验室小鼠品系之间的遗传差异。野生来源的小鼠品系显示出许多重要的疾病表型，例如对各种形式的癌症（例如肝癌、肺癌和皮肤癌）、细菌和病毒感染的抗性。然而，研究这些菌株遗传差异的基础是拥有准确的基因组序列。在本项目中，我们将首先生成最常用的野生小鼠品系的基因组序列，然后使用这些序列和基因结构知识来确定这些品系之间观察到的表型差异的遗传原因。通过结合序列和表型数据，我们将确定序列变异是否可能导致疾病易感性。

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.