The knockout mouse project.

Mouse knockout technology provides a powerful means of elucidating gene function in vivo, and a publicly available genome-wide collection of mouse knockouts would be significantly enabling for biomedical discovery. To date, published knockouts exist for only about 10% of mouse genes. Furthermore, many of these are limited in utility because they have not been made or phenotyped in standardized ways, and many are not freely available to researchers. It is time to harness new technologies and efficiencies of production to mount a high-throughput international effort to produce and phenotype knockouts for all mouse genes, and place these resources into the public domain.

The baffling multitude of disease models for the study of human disease--how can the scientist navigate the huge amount of data and receive guidance?

Funding from external sources is the lifeline for most biomedical research scientists. In the USA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), composed of 27 institutes and centers, is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research. One of these centers, the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) provides financial support and resources to clinical or translational scientists working to understand human disease. Through the Division of Comparative Medicine, the NCRR funds projects focused on the development and use of model organisms to understand, diagnose, prevent and treat disease. Here, officials within the NCRR's Division of Comparative Medicine discuss some of the funding opportunities and resources available to researchers who use model organisms, and their perspectives on the future of model organism research.