Dr. Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena (Professor and Chair, Department of Genetics) was awarded a new R21 grant from the NIH Office of the Director for his project titled “Addressing the impact of ERVs in genome replicability of mouse resources: CC015 as a proof of principle”.
Utilizing a novel bioinformatic pipeline, his team has identified an inbred mouse strain, CC015/Unc, which has a novel highly active germline ERV, the Murine Leukemia Virus (MuLV). This element has the unique property of driving germline insertions at the two-cell embryo stage. On average, this process causes more than three new germline insertions per individual each generation. The study proposes to identify the active MuLV element driving the high germline insertion rates and to ‘cure’ CC015 by elimination of this element. Bioinformatics tools will be applied to make existing genomic mouse datasets accessible to all researchers and expand the toolkit of computational approaches to complement and leverage vertebrate animal models.