The Mouse Phenome Database
(or The Sixth Man)

Commentary

The mouse has been a popular animal model for human disease for more than 75 years. In 1929, for example, Dr. Eric Agduhr described the effect of cod liver oil on lesion development and heart rate in "white" mice.1 The number of transgenic and knockout mouse models has increased dramatically in the last several years as geneticists, molecular biologists, and physiologists have developed better methods for creating and examining new strains. There is clearly a need for comprehensive yet widely available phenotyping tests and data. 2

The Mouse Phenome Project has now been launched at The Jackson Laboratory to enhance the set of research tools for examining the laboratory mouse. This ongoing coordinated international effort will collect and disseminate phenotypic data on commonly used and genetically diverse inbred strains and make this information publicly available via the Mouse Phenome Database (MPD). Our contribution has been a study of cardiac indices in 17 different mouse strains using our rapid non-invasive high throughput AnonyMOUSETM ECG screening system and e-MOUSETM analyses software.3 A "work- up" of BALB/c mice shows them to be relatively active with low cholesterol and low heart rates (Figure 1). C3H/HeJ mice, conversely, are much less active and have relatively high cholesterol and high heart rates. These characteristics are now, for the first time, integrated into a robust data set that will increase their significance to laboratory and clinical investigators worldwide, and possibly reduce the overall demand for new mouse models and mice. Moreover, valuable data are also being captured from existing literature, further bolstering the MPD as a comprehensive source of phenotypic data. The MPD is already proving to be an important tool in linking phenotype to genotype and is already accelerating research by enabling investigators to identify appropriate strains for physiological testing, drug discovery, QTL analysis, and toxicology studies.

Had Dr. Agduhr been presented with a choice of strains and the MPD in 1929, would he have selected a different model for his cod liver studies? Perhaps he would have considered BTBR+Ttf/tf mice for his research, based on Mouse Phenome data showing this strain to have relatively high plasma fibrinogen, low hematocrit, high cholesterol, and rapid heart rate, all markers for cardiovascular disease.4,5 The appropriate phenotyping tools and resources should greatly improve the quantity and quality of data from mouse models of human diseases and therapies.6