The Collaborative Cross - A next generation mouse genetic resource population for high resolution genomic analysis of complex traits

The Collaborative Cross (CC) is a next-generation mouse genetic reference population designed by the mouse genetics community for high resolution mapping of genetic factors of relevance to human health, such as susceptibility to infectious and chronic diseases, and response to medical interventions. However, it is a very flexible resource with very wide potential application to complex traits of interest for human medicine or livestock agriculture. The CC will eventually consist of a set of about 600 recombinant inbred lines of which some 350 are currently available for study. These lines were generated by reciprocal crosses between 8 founder lines, including 5 relatively unrelated classical laboratory strains, and 3 lines derived from recent wild accessions (two Mus subspecies, and one Mus domesticus). The CC resource contains extremely wide genetic diversity relative to existing mouse genetic resources, and has already demonstrated unprecedented power for high resolution QTL mapping. Genotypes and all generated phenotypes will be stored centrally and made publicly available making the CC a “Genotype once, phenotype once” resource.