Scientists outside the project are being lured, too. Samir Kelada, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of NIH head Francis Collins, has already used around 160 pre-CC mice to study gene-environment interactions that cause allergic asthma. They include those that remain perfectly healthy after receiving large doses of asthma allergens and those that wheeze before testing even begins. “They’re just so diverse,” Kelada says.

The CC leaders hope that more researchers like Kelada will use the freely available resource. Unless the project’s founders, who are primarily geneticists, can convince physiologists and biochemists to examine the mice, “the impact is going to be very limited,” Attie says. Thread­gill agrees: “There is no doubt we have to bring in people who are experts in physiology and behavior. We really want it to be a community resource.”

Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Mouse Mash-Up"

3 Comments

1. 1. candide 09:16 AM 2/11/10

   So, has it been figured out when the Great Human Die-Off will happen?

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2. 2. dskan 09:38 AM 2/11/10

   Sweet Darwin, imagine that. Geneticists studying variation...! How far has the philosophy of biology fallen that every step back up the logic ladder is met accolades and hailed as original.
   
   This research is not original, it's a backlash against the intellectual destruction geneticists caused in the '90s. The advent of PCR led to an entire generation of scientists convinced that genes completely explain everything, and that there was no reason to take into account any variation in study organisms. Plus, variation is icky, and who wants ickyness in their error bars?

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3. 3. dskan 09:43 AM 2/11/10

   Although to be fair, it wasn't entirely PCR and the '90s, since the Drosophila geneticists had already long been using lines of flies bred in small bottles for hundreds and thousands of generations.
   
   In large part the problem was the fast rise of molecular biology in the '90s, using 'model' systems without understanding what these systems mean biologically.
   
   And we still feel the effects of that. People study models now for the sake of studying the models, rather than using them to ask any original questions.

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