| The following is an excerpt from The Hybrid Mouse Diversity Panel: a resource for systems genetics analyses of metabolic and cardiovascular traits
The Hybrid Mouse Diversity Panel (HMDP) is a collection of approximately 100 well-characterized inbred strains of mice that can be used to analyze the genetic and environmental factors underlying complex traits. While not nearly as powerful for mapping genetic loci contributing to the traits as human genome-wide association studies, it has some important advantages. First, environmental factors can be controlled. Second, relevant tissues are accessible for global molecular phenotyping. Finally, because inbred strains are renewable, results from separate studies can be integrated. Thus far, the HMDP has been studied for traits relevant to obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, heart failure, immune regulation, fatty liver disease, and host-gut microbiota interactions. High-throughput technologies have been used to examine the genomes, epigenomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, metabolomes, and microbiomes of the mice under various environmental conditions. All of the published data are available and can be readily used to formulate hypotheses about genes, pathways and interactions.
The HMDP was developed as a systems genetics resource similar to recombinant inbred (RI) strain sets (2, 3) or chromosome substitution strains (4), but with the added advantage of high-resolution association mapping (1). It consists of a set of 30 classic inbred strains chosen for diversity plus 70 or more RI strains derived primarily from strains C57BL/6J and DBA/2J (the BxD RI set) and A/J and C57BL/6J (the AxB and BxA RI sets). The classic strains provide mapping resolution, while the RI strains provide power. All of the chosen strains are commercially available from the Jackson Laboratory (https://www.jax.org) and all have been either sequenced (www.sanger.ac.uk/science/data/mouse-genomes-project) or densely genotyped (5).
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