COMPREHENSIVE MAMMALIAN GENETICS - HISTORY AND FUTURE-PROSPECTS OF GENE TRAPPING IN THE MOUSE

Gene trapping has matured into a tool with tremendous potential for ma mmalian biology. It both mutates and helps identify genes and can be s treamlined so that many thousands of insertions can be characterized. In only a few years most of the genome of the mouse will be tagged and mutated using the latest gene trap designs. By creating such a resour ce, costly and time consuming alternative methods of mutagenesis and g ene identification can be avoided allowing biologists to concentrate o n determining gene function in vivo. This will mean a major shift in h ow the genome will be mined for new drug targets. Notably, gene discov ery via gene traps does not suffer from the limitations of other metho ds as it is not biased by expression level. Mouse strains with specifi c gene mutations can be easily derived from a gene trap library constr ucted using embryonic stem cells. These strains will help determine th e role of the gene product in mammalian physiology and hence the relev ance of the gene product to human disease.