Year of the rat...

Things are moving within the rat community as this month's Nature Genetics issue shows with a special on rat genetics exploring the latest developments.

Featuring:

• ENU-induced gene targeting in rats;
• A 'white paper' discussing progress and prospects in rat genetics;
• A brief overview on rat genome resources online;
• ENU-induced gene targeting in rats;
• A contribution on dynamics of CNV in rat and their impact in phenotypes;
• A survey of genetic variation from The STAR Consortium (over 3 million newly identified SNPs and over 20,000 SNPs genotyped across 167 distinct inbred rat strains);
  
• and several papers focusing on the identification of genetic variants associated to rat models of human disease...

The driving force behind these outstanding achievements can be found on a well interliked rat community bridging resources across the Atlantic: RGD and the EURATools Consortium (FP6 contract number LSHG-CT-2005-019015) collaborations are a good example.

EURATools investigators are developing integrated genome tools (Ensembl is one of the partners of this consortium). Integrating high-throughput sequencing and genotyping with informatics; intensive analysis of phenotypes, gene sequence and gene expression in congenic strains to identify genes and regulatory pathways for a wide range of rat disease phenotypes; and establishing optimised protocols for rat gene targeting are the goals of this ambitious EU funded project.