Knocks heard 'round the world

While researchers typically create knockout mice to ask specific questions about a gene, the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC) wants to get a full picture of every gene's function by creating knockout mice for the entire genome. At its annual meeting, the consortium announced it is more than halfway toward the first goal of phenotyping 5,000 uncharacterized genes, and its leaders believe the cooperative system they have developed could be a blueprint for emerging consortia like the Precision Medicine Initiative.

Although it's taken about 10 years to reach this point, Steve Brown, chair of the IMPC international steering committee and director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Harwell mouse phenotyping center, told BioCentury the group is on track to complete the first 5,000 genes by next year, and the full 21,000 that make up the genome by 2021. That progress is due in part to the growing number of groups that are signing on to join the consortium, but also because of technical advances in gene editing that make the process of generating knockout mice faster and easier...