The International Mammalian Genome Society (IMGS) sponsors the annual Mouse Genome Conference with alternating location in the United States, Europe and Japan. Since 1990, attendance has grown from 100 to 350. Many leaders in the field are regular participants. The meeting has also attracted young investigators and newcomers to the field, providing an opportunity for contacts with established investigators. This conference provides a forum for discussion of new initiatives for understanding the function of genes identified by the human genome project. Current programs in large scale regional and genome-wide mutagenesis of the mouse, in this country and abroad, had their inception in discussions at the 1994 and 1995 meetings. The Conference provides the setting for regular meetings of the International Mouse Chromosome Committees, which generate the standard genetic maps that integrate the positions of genes, mutants, and anonymous DNA markers in the mouse genome. The Chromosome Committee maps are accessible electronically through the Mouse Genome Database at the Jackson Laboratory, and have been an important tool for defining human/mouse conserved linkage groups, positional cloning of mouse mutants, and construction of a physical map. The Conference has stimulated international collaborations and provided a sense of community to investigators in the field. It hosts meetings of the Editorial Board of the IMGS journal, Mammalian Genome, and the Mouse Nomenclature Committee, a body that has maintained systematic nomenclature for mouse for more than 40 years. Speakers and chairs include strong representation of women. This application requests support for the next two meetings in this series, the 1999 meeting to be organized by Maja Bucan, Ph. D. in Philadelphia, and the year 2000 meeting to be organized by Yoshihide Hayashizaki, M. D., Ph. D., in Yokohama, Japan. The intellectual focus of these meetings will be directed towards functional mammalian genomics, an area in which the mouse plays an increasingly central role, and towards analysis of large scale sequence data. Topics will include mutagenesis screens, analysis of quantitative and multigenic traits, functional evaluation of new mutants and comparative large scale human/mouse sequence analysis.
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| Meisler, M H (1996) The role of the laboratory mouse in the human genome project. Am J Hum Genet 59:764-71 |
