- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is the IMPC?
- Translating to other species and learning about human disease
- The home page of the IMPC website
- Searching for a gene of interest
- Gene pages
- Chart pages
- Searching for phenotypes
- Phenotype pages
- Late Adult data
- Image data
- Data downloads
- Try it yourself
- Quiz: check your learning
- Summary
- Your feedback
- Get help and support on the IMPC
- References
Mouse phenotyping
The IMPC implements a high-throughput phenotyping pipeline to characterise mice. Phenotyping focuses on major organ systems and main areas associated with human disease. Both mutants and control (wildtype) mice are phenotyped following standardised procedures. A detailed description of the procedures and the parameters that are collected can be found in the IMPReSS section of the IMPC website (International Mouse Phenotyping Resource of Standardised Screens).
The IMPC Embryo, Early Adult and Late Adult pipelines
The IMPC implements three phenotyping pipelines based on the age of the animals studied.
The viability of the pups is assessed at the pre-weaning stage (Figure 5, top left panel). When homozygotes for the knockout allele are viable, these are the mutants studied in the Early Phenotyping pipeline. When homozygotes are not viable, the heterozygotes are the mutants studied in the Early Phenotyping pipeline.
- The Early Adult phenotyping pipeline is the main IMPC pipeline and is applied to young adult mice:
- The procedures are implemented to mice between weeks 9 and 16 of age (Figure 5, bottom right panel)
- Allows to determine the potential deviations of the mutants from the controls (wildtype) in phenotypes such as hearing, heart function, metabolism, etc.
- The Embryo phenotyping pipeline is applied durin embryonic development:
- Applied to non-viable homozygous lines with age measured as embryonic days (Figure 5, bottom left panel)
- Determines the developmental deffects taking place at this stage in life and thus learn about gene function
- The Late Adult phenotyping pipeline is applied later in life:
- Applied to aged mice, satarting on week 49 or later (Figure 5, top right panel)
- Same procedures as in the Early Adult phenotyping pipeline
- Identifies phenotypes appearing later in life
Characteristics of the IMPC phenotyping pipeline
- The phenotyping pipeline is broad, attempting to reveal insights into human disease by measuring embryonic, neuromuscular, sensory, cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, haematological and neurological parameters
- Tests are performed in sequence, so that the previous tests don’t influence the results of subsequent tests
- For all experiments, sex and weight are documented and used as covariates in the analyses