PROJECT SUMMARY As the cost of genome-scale sequencing continues to decrease and new technologies for genome editing become widely adopted, the laboratory mouse is more important than ever as a model system for understanding the biological significance of human genetic variation and for advancing the emergence of genomic medicine. The Mouse Genome Database (MGD) has a unique and strategic role as a community resource for facilitating the use of the laboratory mouse for understanding genomics underlying human biology and disease. MGD serves three major user communities: (i) biomedical researchers who use mouse experimentation to investigate genetic and molecular principles of biology and disease processes, (ii) translational scientists who use the laboratory mouse to model human disease, and (iii) bioinformaticians/ computational biologists who use the rich integrated data MGD provides to develop algorithms and bioinformatics tools for data analysis and interpretation. During the project period, we will continue to curate and integrate new genetic, genomic, variant, functional, phenotypic, and human disease model data essential to researchers using the laboratory mouse in biomedical research. We will make these data freely available through a variety of web-based and programmatic user interfaces. Our core aims include: (i) maintaining the canonical catalog of mouse genome features, (ii) serving as the authoritative data for mouse functional annotations, and (iii) maintaining a comprehensive catalog of mouse mutations and strains and their phenotype and disease model associations. To support our aims, we will maintain cost-effective software, database, and hardware using industry best practices. We will maintain MGD's secure infrastructure through regular maintenance, upgrades, and planned evolution. We will leverage existing software components from the Alliance of Genome Resources and other resources where possible and focus our software development activities on unique infrastructure needed to support our core aims. To ensure the greatest impact of MGD in the broader scientific community, we will provide robust user support and outreach through online user documentation, tutorials, training workshops, and one-on-one assistance using a variety of communication modalities and major social media tools. We will actively solicit community input, data submissions, and collaborations.

Project Narrative/Public Health Relevance Virtually all advances in medicine rely on the use of animal models to generate, test and evaluate hypotheses relevant to human biology. Chief among these animal models is the laboratory mouse. In this era of genome- scale, data-driven biomedical research, the Mouse Genome Database (MGD) plays a pivotal role in standardizing, integrating, and disseminating information about the laboratory mouse as a model system for understanding human biology and disease processes. MGD's focus on supporting three distinct user groups -- basic scientists, clinical researchers, and computational biologists -- ensures the broadest possible impact of the resource in contributing to the development of new tools and hypotheses for advancing our understanding of the human genome and how it functions, and for advancing genomic approaches to improving human health.