The laboratory mouse serves as a pivotal animal model in gene expression and function studies, because it is closely related to the human and because tissues from many different mouse strains and mutants are readily available for detailed analysis. Micro-array based studies will generate large volumes of gene expression data for the mouse. To take full advantage of this valuable information, the data must be placed in, and analyzed in, the larger biological context. The Mouse Gene Expression Database (GXD) will facilitate this task. Designed as an open-ended community resource that can integrate many different types of expression data, GXD aims to provide increasingly complete information about what transcripts and proteins are produced by what genes; where, when and in what amounts these gene products are expressed; and how their expression varies in different mouse strains and mutants. A comprehensive hierarchically structured anatomical dictionary for the mouse enables a consistent description of expression results from assays with differing spatial resolution, analysis of expression patterns at different levels of detail, and correlation with anatomy and phenotype/disease data. Controlled vocabularies to describe biological processes, molecular functions and cellular components, being developed as part of the Gene Ontology project, provide additional classification schemes for gene products and thus important new search parameters for expression data. GXD is available at http://www.informatics.jax.org/. It is integrated with the Mouse Genome Database (MGD) to enable a combined analysis of genotype, expression, and phenotype data. Extensive interconnections with sequence databases and with databases from other species extend GXD’s utility for analysis of gene expression information. The current status of GXD will be presented and future developments will be discussed with a particular emphasis on micro-array data.
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