Coding variants in mouse and rat model organisms: mousepost and ratpost.

Abstract

Mice and rats are the most commonly used vertebrate model organisms in biomedical research. The availability of a reference genome in both animals combined with the deep sequencing of several doze of popular inbred lines also provides rich sequence variation data in these species. In some cases, such sequence variants can be linked directly to a distinctive phenotype. In previous work, we created the mouse and rat online searchable databases ("Mousepost" and "Ratpost") where small variant information for protein coding transcripts in mouse and rat inbred strains can be easily retrieved at the amino acid level. These tools are directly useful in forward genetics strategies or as a repository of existing sequence variations. Here, we perform a comparison between the "Mousepost" and "Ratpost" databases and we couple these two tools to a database of human sequence variants ClinVar. We investigated the level of redundancy and complementarity of known variants in protein coding transcripts and found that the large majority of variants is species-specific. However, a small set of positions is conserved in an inbred line between both species. We conclude that both databases are highly complementary, but this may change with further sequencing efforts in both species.