In addition to continuing the essential core functions of MGD, three major enhancements are planned for this resource over the next year. First, following the decision of NCBI’s dbSNP to no longer include variation data from model organisms, MGD will implement data loads for mouse SNP data from the European Variation Archive (EVA; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/eva/). Second, we will implement new user interfaces focused on delivering diverse data about individual mouse strains. Although we have provided a strain accession ID service and descriptions of strain characteristics from the classic Festing's inbred strain lists resource for many years (http://www.informatics.jax.org/inbred_strains/mouse/STRAINS.shtml), the new strain detail pages will provide access to detailed information about strain-specific mutations, phenotype and disease model information, published references, and links to multiple external resources such as Mouse Phenome Database (MPD) (16), the International Mouse Strain Resource (IMSR) (7) and MGD’s new Multiple Genome Viewer. Third, the Multiple Genome Viewer will be extended to support display of the intron/exon structure of protein coding genes to allow the comparison of gene structure across strains.
