High-Diversity Mouse Populations for Complex Traits

Contemporary mouse genetic reference populations are a powerful platform to discover complex disease mechanisms. Advanced high-diversity mouse populations include the Collaborative Cross (CC) strains, Diversity Outbred (DO) stock, and their isogenic founder strains. When used in systems genetics and integrative genomics analyses, these populations efficiently harnesses known genetic variation for precise and contextualized identification of complex disease mechanisms. Extensive genetic, genomic, and phenotypic data are already available for these high-diversity mouse populations and a growing suite of data analysis tools have been developed to support research on diverse mice. This integrated resource can be used to discover and evaluate disease mechanisms relevant across species. High-diversity mouse populations with known and reproducible genetic variation make complex trait genetics tractable in a mammalian system.Together, these populations are a valuable integrated and scalable tool for discovery genetics in complex trait studies.The Collaborative Cross (CC), its founders, and the heterozygous CC-RIX derived from crosses of the CC strains are a fully reproducible population for exact genome-matched correlational and controlled studies.The Diversity Outbred (DO) population displays high genetic and phenotypic variability and enables precise genetic mapping.Cross-species genomic analysis of mouse-derived results allows comparative and translational applications.