The NIH is kicking off round two in the Knockout Mouse Project, a $110 million, 5-year effort to scramble the genes of thousands of rodents in order to calculate the traits linked to every protein-coding gene in the mammalian genome. That will give scientists a much better idea of the genetic causes of diseases, which in turn could provide a road map for drug developers. "The generation of detailed phenotypic information for each knockout mouse strain will be a boon to disease researchers who want to determine the function of genes and to improve mouse models of human disease," says NIH director Francis S. Collins. Story