PROJECT SUMMARY
As the cost of genome-scale sequencing continues to decrease and new technologies for genome editing
become widely adopted, the laboratory mouse is more important than ever as a model system for
understanding the biological significance of human genetic variation and for advancing the emergence of
genomic medicine. The Mouse Genome Database (MGD) has a unique and strategic role as a community
resource for facilitating the use of the laboratory mouse for understanding genomics underlying human biology
and disease. MGD serves three major user communities: (i) biomedical researchers who use mouse
experimentation to investigate genetic and molecular principles of biology and disease processes, (ii)
translational scientists who use the laboratory mouse to model human disease, and (iii) bioinformaticians/
computational biologists who use the rich integrated data MGD provides to develop algorithms and
bioinformatics tools for data analysis and interpretation.
During the project period, we will continue to curate and integrate new genetic, genomic, variant, functional,
phenotypic, and human disease model data essential to researchers using the laboratory mouse in biomedical
research. We will make these data freely available through a variety of web-based and programmatic user
interfaces. Our core aims include: (i) maintaining the canonical catalog of mouse genome features, (ii) serving
as the authoritative data for mouse functional annotations, and (iii) maintaining a comprehensive catalog of
mouse mutations and strains and their phenotype and disease model associations.
To support our aims, we will maintain cost-effective software, database, and hardware using industry best
practices. We will maintain MGD's secure infrastructure through regular maintenance, upgrades, and planned
evolution. We will leverage existing software components from the Alliance of Genome Resources and other
resources where possible and focus our software development activities on unique infrastructure needed to
support our core aims.
To ensure the greatest impact of MGD in the broader scientific community, we will provide robust user support
and outreach through online user documentation, tutorials, training workshops, and one-on-one assistance
using a variety of communication modalities and major social media tools. We will actively solicit community
input, data submissions, and collaborations.