Coordination and Integration of the results of animal research are an ever-increasing challenge. Jane Qiu finds out what happens when big biology meets a small rodent. If mice could build a high-rise supercity, it might look something like this. Stack upon Stack of clean, shiny plastic cages gleam inside the air-conditioned suites at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. With a capacity to house thousands of mouse lines, the institute has the ambition of becom-ing the world's largest warehouse for knockout mice, in which individual genes have been selectively deleted, or 'knocked out', from the genome. There are about 25,000 mouse genes, so the scale of the project is enormous and the cost is astronomical. "No Single institute will be able to accomplish this alone," acknowledges Allan Bradley, director of the institute.
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