Washington University School of Medicine Genome Sequencing Center

The Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University School of Medicine (GSC) is a leader in the global mouse sequencing effort. Mouse genomic sequence is produced at the GSC in the form of whole genome shotgun sequence, as part of the Mouse Sequencing Consortium (MSC) and as mapped BAC clones in collaboration with other centers, under funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute. All data generated is freely available for the unrestricted use of researchers worldwide.

The GSC is one of three centers making up the Mouse Sequencing Consortium (MSC) which was formed by the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and three private companies (GlaxoSmithKline, Merck Genome Research Institute and Affymetrix, Inc.) to accelerate efforts to sequence the mouse genome. In addition to Washington University, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research(WIBR) in Cambridge, Mass. (http://www.wi.mit.edu/) , and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/) were sequencing centers for this project. The initial MSC goal of 2.5 - 3x coverage of the mouse genome has been met. These individual reads are being deposited in the Trace Repository, a searchable database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/trace.cgi ), and at the Ensembl Trace Server (http://trace.ensembl.org/).

The mouse genome sequences have been aligned to the human genome working draft sequence to assist in annotation. The aligned
mouse sequence can be viewed at Ensembl (http://mouse.ensembl.org/) and the UCSC Genome Browser (http://genome.ucsc.edu/). The GSC, WIBR, and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute are continuing their collaboration to increase coverage to 5 - 6x by December, 2001.

Information about GSC's mouse project can be obtained by visiting this website: http://genome.wustl.edu/projects/mouse/index.php

If you have comments or questions about this page or mouse genome sequencing at Washington University, please send us email at mouse@genome.wustl.edu.