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The European Commission has approved the world's first major systemsbiology programme to study the rat.Known as EURATRANS -for European large-scale functional genomics in the rat for translational research -the multimillion-euro project includes collaborators in the United States and Japan. The aim of the initiative is to expand databases of genes, proteins and other biomolecules, analysing the information and translating it into a form that is useful to clinical researchers.The effort represents a comeback for the rat, which fell from scientific prominence during the mouse-dominated genomics era, despite the unprecedented amounts of physiological data that have been gathered from it over the centuries."The rat is a better model than the mouse for many complex disorders that are so common in humans, like cardiovascular and psychiatric disease, " says EURATRANS coordinator Norbert Hübner, a geneticist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. "The project will help rat genetics catch up with the many-years head start that mouse genetics has enjoyed. "In the late 1980s, researchers developed a technique to knock out single genes from mice using embryonic stem cells as a starting material, making it possible for geneticists to engineer the mutant strains needed to model human disease. Rat genetics proved trickier to manipulate, and the mouse's popularity as a lab animal soared.Two things have happened in the past few years that make a major assault on the rat feasible and worthwhile, says Hüb-ner. "First, the huge advances in sequencing and other molecular technologies, and second, the problem which was preventing the development of gene knock-out technology in rats has been overcome. " Last year, Austin Smith, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues achieved this by altering the culture medium conditions used to grow embryonic cells in vitro 1 . Knock-out rats have not yet been created using these cells, but this is one of the aims of the EURATRANS project, in which Smith is also a participant.The 16 institutions participating in EURA-TRANS will receive a total of €10.5 million (US$14.9 million) from the commission, which they will match from their own resources. The money will be used to create detailed genome sequences of the eight progenitor strains of rat that gave rise to the stock rats generated at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland, the diverse genetics of which mirrors that of human populations. The project will also apply state-of-the-art technologies in order to generate data on rat functional genomics. Thirty additional 'recombinant inbred strains' created at the Praguebased Institute of Physiology, part of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, will also get this treatment. These rats were made by crossing the two strains of rat that have already had their genomes sequencedthe Norwegian brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) 2 and the albino spontaneously hypertensive...

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The percentage of people experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety has surged amid the COVID-19 pandemic, data from nationally representative surveys show.

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