Gene Editing Rat Resource Center (GERRC): Designer rats for heart, lung and blood studies

The age of rat genome editing through the use of Zinc-Finger Nucleases (ZFNs), TAL Effector Nucleases (TALENs) and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-Cas9 (CRISPR/Cas9) nuclease systems has made available to all investigators thousands of gene-modified strains which can be used to validate a gene underlying a quantitative trait locus, to test a nominated human gene or to design follow up studies to define function of predicted genes or sequence variants. We are currently in the fourth year of developing rat models for investigators to validate human variation and study function and mechanism for genes implicated in heart, lung and blood disorders. The Gene Editing Rat Resource Center (GERRC) is an R24 grant funded by NHLBI that enables us to utilize an already existing infrastructure of personnel, expertise in gene editing, embryo microinjection, high-throughput genotyping, sequencing, cryopreservation and rat distribution channels to generate and provide novel and important rat mod...