Its goal, as stated in the National Institutes of Health’s Request for Grant Application: HL-99-013, is the establishment of a Rat Genome Database to collect, consolidate, and integrate data generated from ongoing rat genetic and genomic research efforts and make this data widely available to the scientific community.
A secondary, but critical goal is to provide curation of mapped positions for quantitative trait loci, known mutations and other phenotypic data.
The rat continues to be extensively used by researchers as a model organism for investigating pharmacology, toxicology, general physiology and the biology and pathophysiology of disease.
Additional sections of the portal display data for phenotypes, biological processes and pathways related to the disease category.
Additional sections of the portal display data for phenotypes, biological processes and pathways related to the disease category.
However, with the rise of technologies such as Zinc finger nuclease- and CRISPR -based mutagenesis techniques, that is no longer the case.
Funding for both the PhysGenKO project and the GERRC came from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI).
The stated goal of both projects is to produce rats with alterations in one or more specific genes related to the mission of the NHLBI.
[24] Additional educational activities include the production of tutorial videos, both outlining how to use RGD tools and data, and on more general topics such as biomedical ontologies and biological (i.e. gene, QTL and strain) nomenclature.
The principal investigator of the grant is Anne E. Kwitek, who was appointed to this leadership position from Mary E. Shimoyama, in March 2020.