Researchers report first Haplobank data

In a paper published in Nature, researchers at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and colleagues reported the first data from Haplobank, an open-access haploid mouse embryonic stem cell (ESC) bank created in collaboration with the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR). The team screened Haplobank to identify 11 previously unknown genes involved in angiogenesis and confirmed that another gene was involved in the host response to rhinovirus.

To build the bank, the team used insertional mutagenesis instead of approaches like CRISPR-based genome editing to take advantage of invertible splice acceptors, which allow for reversible mutations that let the researchers use the banked cell lines to compare phenotypes within a clone. Users of the Haplobank cell lines can use the direct comparisons to avoid clonal variability that sometimes causes irreproducibility...