RESEARCH THE MIGHTY MOUSE The mouse--invaluable to human medical research--gets a new facility at UC Davis as the Jackson Laboratory, the world's foremost nonprofit institution for mouse-based genetics research, headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, establishes a new West Coast collaboration with the campus. This program will complement the growing UC Davis Mouse Biology Program. The Jackson Laboratory portion of the collaborative program, to be known as JAX Research Systems at UC Davis, will produce and maintain genetically customized laboratory mice, which will be made available to researchers at UC Davis and throughout the western United States. "The mouse is the preeminent tool for understanding gene function in the whole mammalian organism, with direct benefit to both human and veterinary medicine," said Stephen Barthold, director of the UC Davis Center for Comparative Medicine and director of the UC Davis Mouse Biology Program. The mice produced at the facility will include transgenic mice, with genes inserted to produce given physical traits useful in studying the genetic origin and development of a variety of human and animal diseases. Production of such mice has occurred for years in individual labs across the UC Davis campus. In 1997, the UC Davis Mouse Biology Program was established to help consolidate those efforts and strengthen campuswide collaboration in the studies of how genes function in the whole animal. The new collaboration will roughly double the number of genetically altered research mice on campus, bringing the total to 20,000 to 30,000 mice. A 10,000-square-foot structure, Building M-3, will house the mice at the UC Davis Animal Resources Service, located on Old Davis Road south of Interstate-80. Plans also are under way for renovating Building M-2, a second structure of equal size. Both buildings will be remodeled to provide sophisticated microbiologic and environmental barrier protection for the valuable mouse colonies. Half of the complex will be devoted to Jackson Laboratory mice and the other half to UC Davis mice. The Jackson Laboratory program will breed and distribute common inbred strains of mice to research institutions in the western United States and will import and maintain small colonies of mice. Officials at both UC Davis and the Jackson Laboratory expect the new alliance also will spawn collaborative research opportunities among scientists at both institutions and new graduate-student training programs at UC Davis.