$3.8 M for studies of the physiology and genetics of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular health.

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The National Institutes of Health has awarded $3.8 million to the University of California, Davis, to fund a new mouse-based research center devoted to studies of the physiology and genetics of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular health.

A major focus for the new Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center will be cardiovascular disease, which affects more than 82 million Americans, costs an estimated $444 billion annually and is the nation’s leading cause of death.

The new center will provide scientists worldwide with complete physiologic characterizations of mice that have been genetically altered for metabolic studies. It will be one of only six such centers in the United States, and the only one that can create the mice for researchers.

The genetically customized mice have individual genes systematically turned off or “knocked out,” or have a gene ramped up to make them either more prone or more resistant to specific diseases. Such mice play important roles in studying the relationships between specific genes and the complex traits that define a disease.

Ref and Read more: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/26357

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