Jackson Laboratory Partners with University of Tennessee in Biodefense Research
Date: November 5, 2003
The Jackson Laboratory is now an important partner in the nation's biodefense and microbiological research, even though no infectious disease research is conducted at the Laboratory's campus in Bar Harbor.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has announced the formation of two National and nine Regional Biocontainment Laboratories across the nation that will be used for biodefense and microbiological research related to serious emerging infections. One of these Regional Biocontainment Laboratories will be built on the campus of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) in Memphis, with The Jackson Laboratory as one of UTHSC's primary partners.
In the research collaboration with UTHSC, The Jackson Laboratory will be providing expertise and resources towards the goal of identifying the complex genes associated with resistance or susceptibility to various infectious agents. According to Jackson Laboratory Associate Director and Director of Research Barbara Knowles, Ph.D., "We have different 'strains' or families of mice that have been inbred for many generations, and each of these strains represents a separate pool of genes that confer sensitivity or resistance to a particular agent. And because mouse and human genes are so similar, finding these genes in mice makes it easy to find them in humans."
As the research project progresses, Dr. Knowles explains, the information gathered will be entered into a database and made available to infectious disease researchers around the world.
In an example of how useful mice are in this kind of research: in 2001 a team at Harvard Medical School announced they had used different strains of JAX® Mice to discover a protein that protects from infection by the anthrax bacterium, a protein that appears to be controlled by a single gene.
Dr. Abigail L. Smith, Jackson Laboratory Director of Health and Husbandry Research and a renowned expert in veterinary infectious disease research, will be training the Memphis investigators to use biocontainment laboratories and animal facilities.
Contact(s): Joyce Peterson, 207-288-6058, joyce.peterson@jax.org
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