The MRC is investing more than £20m in a major new network in mouse genetics for disease modelling to accelerate our understanding of human disease and improve diagnosis and treatments. The National Mouse Genetics Network will bring together a package of distinctive research clusters across the UK and long-term partnership with the Mary Lyon Centre (MLC).
Research Clusters
The Network, led by National Director Professor Owen Sansom, will capitalise on the UK’s international excellence in mouse and human genetics, and wider biomedical sciences. The new investment will comprise a small number of distributed research clusters pursuing distinctive, but complementary, challenge-led research and will be embedded within UK research organisations. The distributed cluster investments will provide a platform to support ambitious, multi-dimensional and thematically-focused research that brings together mouse genetics with complementary capabilities across human, cell, tissue and in silico systems.
The Mary Lyon Centre
The new national investment will bring together centres of excellence in mouse genetics and long-term partnerships with the MLC in Harwell. The Mary Lyon Centre will act as a national facility hub providing world-class expertise, tools, resources, and specialist technologies and services not readily available elsewhere. It will act as a central repository for, and provider of, the genetically engineered mice and associated data delivered through its own phenotyping platforms and those of the clusters. The MLC will manage the distribution of mouse models to the wider national and international communities and will also act as a national training hub to support specialist skills and capacity needs. Whilst the MLC will establish new partnerships with the research clusters, it will continue its core business of providing specialist services to the wider UK academic and industry mouse research communities including, genome engineering, advanced phenotyping and cryopreservation.
Researchers who are interested in either leading a research cluster or offering expertise as an associate member are now invited to submit their expression of interest in the National Mouse Genetic Network Clusters here.
