Transgenic and knockout databases: behavioral profiles of mouse mutants

Genetically engineered strains of mice, modified by transgenesis or gene targeting ("knockouts") are being generated at an impressive rate and used, among other areas, as premiere research tools in deciphering the genetic basis of behavior. As behavioral phenotyping strategies continue to evolve, characterization of these "designer" mice will provide models to evaluate the efficacy of new pharmacological and gene therapy treatments in human hereditary diseases. Reported behavioral profiles include aberrant social, reproductive, and parental behaviors, learning and memory deficits, feeding disorders, aggression, anxiety-related behaviors, pain/analgesia, and altered responses to antidepressants, antipsychotics, ethanol, and psychostimulant drugs of abuse. The Induced Mutant Resource (IMR) at The Jackson Laboratory (TJL, Bar Harbor, ME, USA) imports, cryopreserves, develops, maintains, and distributes biomedically important stocks of transgenic and targeted mutant mice to the research community. Information on neurological/behavioral strains--including behavioral performance, husbandry requirements, strain availability, and genetic typing protocols--is provided through the IMR database (http://www.jax.org/resources/documents/imr/). A catalog of available strains is readily accessible via the JAX Mice website at http://jaxmice.jax.org/index.shtml. In addition, TJL is now host to TBASE (http://tbase.jax.org/), a comprehensive, public-domain database with primary emphasis on mouse knockouts. TBASE contains an exhaustive list of knockout-related citations and provides an extensive phenotypic characterization of numerous behavioral mutants that is extracted directly from the literature. Present efforts to merge the two resources into a novel, schematically enhanced database, provisionally named Transgenic and Targeted Mutation Database (TTMD), will be briefly discussed.