Notice Number: NOT-OD-05-015

Key Dates
Release Date: December 10, 2004

This Request for Information (RFI) is for information and planning purposes only and should not be construed as a solicitation or as an obligation on the part of the Government. The Government does not intend to award a cooperative agreement or grant on the basis of responses to this RFI nor otherwise pay for the preparation of any information submitted or for the Government's use of such information.

Description

Background

An international meeting held in the autumn of 2003 and recently reported in Nature Genetics (Austin et al., Nature Genetics , September 2004; 36(9): 921-924) recommended that a public resource project be initiated to create a null mutation for every protein-coding gene in the mouse genome to take advantage of the demonstrated power of knockout mice to elucidate gene function. While a current estimate is that there may be knockout ES cells for as many as 30% to 50% of mouse genes, to adequately determine the magnitude of the effort that would be required for a mouse knockout initiative, NIH is doing an inventory of how many appropriate ES cell lines and mice have been made that are available to the entire research community under reasonable conditions. This RFI is aimed at soliciting information from the research community designed to aid in assembly of this inventory.

Information Requested

Investigators who have constructed mouse knockouts and/or mutant ES cell lines are invited to provide the NIH with information about their constructs, and may do so readily at www.informatics.jax.org/mgihome//submissions/knockout_inventory.shtml. Please note that our inventory currently includes information supplied by the MGI database, as well as gene target information from the sequence entries in dbGSS. Therefore, published mutants may already be included in our inventory. If you have additional information to that already compiled for your mutant(s), please enter it at the web site; we will eliminate redundancy at a later stage. The deadline for submittals is Feb 1, 2005.

The information supplied will be used to (i) assemble an inventory of currently existing ES cells and mice containing a null mutation, (ii) identify which of those are already publicly available or could be released to the public, as well as the source (public repository or individual labs) from which they can be obtained, and (iii) as necessary, to facilitate the placement of these cells and mice into repositories for efficient distribution to the research community, thereby reducing the burdens of distribution on the individual investigators who first created them. The compilation will help us in determining how much effort would actually be required, as well as avoiding the duplication of previous work, as we consider the establishment of a publicly available repository of ES cells containing null mutations in all of the protein-encoding genes in the mouse genome. One of the primary reasons for considering such a repository is our expectation that it will result in a substantial savings of labor and expense by investigators who must now expend their own resources to generate mutant ES cells and mice. When the inventory has been completed, the results will be made available on http://www.nih.gov/science/models/mouse/ and by Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) .

Responses

Responses are to be made by submitting information through www.informatics.jax.org/mgihome//submissions/knockout_inventory.shtml, or alternatively, if your have questions, email KOMP@mail.nih.gov.

For questions and further information please contact:

Jane L. Peterson, Ph.D., Program Director
Mark Moore, Ph.D., Consultant
National Human Genome Research Institute
National Institutes of Health
5635 Fishers Lane Suite 4076, MSC 9305
Bethesda, Maryland 20892-9305
Phone: (301) 496-7531
Email: KOMP@mail.nih.gov

Acknowledgement of receipt of responses will not be made, nor will respondents be notified of the Government's assessment of the information received. No basis for claims against the Government shall arise as a result of a response to this request for information or the Government's use of such information as either part of our evaluation process or in developing specifications for any subsequent announcement.

Weekly TOC for this Announcement
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices

			Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
NIH... Turning Discovery Into Health® Note: For help accessing PDF, RTF, MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Audio or Video files, see Help Downloading Files.