The Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project: School Tutorial

Introduction

The UK MRC Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh is developing a digital atlas of mouse development. The project is in collaboration with the Department of Anatomy, University of Edinburgh and the Jackson Laboratory (USA).

The basic idea is to build a digital model of the mouse embryo for each time step (stage) in development. Each model embryo will then be used as a framework or "database" into which results from many experiments can be mapped. In this way, experimental data can be stored and compared to find important relationships. The sort of information that will be mapped will be in situ gene expression (places where genes are active) and cell lineage (where tissues come from and what they become). Information from experiments done in many different laboratories will be mapped to the same model embryos. This will make sure that the information is accessible to all scientists so as to minimise the need for more experiments.

In these pages you can browse through the various aspects of this project, how we are trying to solve the biological and technical problems and some of the results so far. You can also click on some of the images to get bigger versions or sometimes movies.