Infrafrontier Background
Medically related Life Sciences use the mouse as a model system to understand the molecular basis of health and disease in humans (>95% similarity of genes in humans and mice). An essential task for Biomedical Sciences in the 21st century will be the functional analysis of mouse models for every gene in the mammalian genome. More than 30000 mutations in ES cells will be engineered and thousands of mouse models for human diseases will become available over the next years by the collaborative efforts of the International Mouse Knockout Consortium.
The major bottlenecks identified by the user community will be proper characterisation (Mouse Clinics), archiving and dissemination of mouse disease models to the research laboratories. The current capacities, governance structures and funding strategies of existing infrastructures will not be able to serve the upcoming urgent needs. Existing facilities across Europe can only offer capacity for the analysis and dissemination of a few hundred disease models per year.
Thus it is imperative to organise and establish now an efficient distributed infrastructure for the phenotyping, archiving and dissemination of mouse models on a well-concerted, large-scale and pan-European level. This will be a prerequisite for maintaining Europe's leading role in the functional annotation of the mouse genome. Infrafrontier will guarantee the accessibility of mouse models and will be essential to facilitate their exploitation.