Availability and characterization of transgenic and knockout mice with behavioral manifestations: where to look and what to search for

Mice altered by transgenesis or gene targeting ('knockouts') have increasin gly been employed as alternative effective tools in elucidating the genetic basis of neurophysiology and behavior. Standardization of specific behavio ral paradigms and phenotyping strategies will ensure that these behavioral mouse mutants offer robust models for evaluating the efficacy of novel ther apeutics in the treatment of hereditary neurological disorders. The Induced Mutant Resource (IMR) at The Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, Maine, USA) i mports. cryopreserves. develops, maintains, and distributes to the research community biomedically valuable stocks of transgenic and targeted mutant m ice. Information on behavioral and neurological strains -including a phenot ypic synopsis, husbandry requirements. strain availability, and genetic typ ing protocols-is available through the IMR database (http:// www.jax.org/re sources/documents/imr/). A current catalog of available strains is readily accessible via the JAX((R))Mice Web site at http://jaxmice.jax.org/index.sh tml. In addition. The Jackson Laboratory is now home to TBASE (http://tbase .jax.org/), a comprehensive. community database whose primary focus is on m ouse knockouts. TBASE accommodates an exhaustive bibliographical resource f or transgenic and knockout mice and provides a detailed phenotypic characte rization of numerous behavioral knockouts that is primarily extracted from the literature, Concerted efforts to merge the two resources into a new, sc hematically reformed database are underway. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.