Abstract

The laboratory mouse is the organism of choice for many studies in biology and medicine. Reliable phenotypic data are essential for the full utility of genotypic information emerging from efforts to sequence human and mouse genomes. The Mouse Phenome Project has been organized to help accomplish this task by establishing a collection of baseline phenotypic data on commonly used and genetically diverse inbred mouse strains and making this information publicly available through a web-accessible database. The Mouse Phenome Database (MPD) is being developed to manage these data and to provide researchers with tools for exploring both raw phenotypic data and comparative summary analyses. The MPD serves as a repository for detailed protocols and raw data. This resource enables investigators to identify appropriate strains for (1) physiological testing, (2) drug discovery, (3) toxicology studies, (4) mutagenesis, (5) modeling human diseases, (6) QTL analyses and identification of new genes and (7) unraveling the influence of environment on genotype.