Genome wide conditional mouse knockout resources

The International Knockout Mouse Consortium (IKMC) developed high throughput gene trapping and gene targeting pipelines that produced mostly conditional mutations of more than 18,500 genes in C57BL/6N mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells which have been archived and are freely available to the research community as a frozen resource. From this unprecedented resource more than 6000 mutant mouse strains have been generated by the IKMC in collaboration with the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC). In addition, a cre-driver resource was established including 250 C57BL/6 cre-inducible mouse strains. Complementing the cre-driver resource, a collection comprising 27 rAAVs expressing cre in a tissue-specific manner has also been produced. All resources are easily accessible from the IKMC/IMPC web portal ( www.mousephenotype.org ). The IKMC/IMPC resource is a standardized reference library of mouse models with defined genetic backgrounds enabling the analysis of gene-disease associations in mice of different genetic makeup and should therefore have a major impact on biomedical research.