Cover image

Cover Classical inbred mouse strains are derived from a mixed but limited pool of founders from several subspecies of Mus musculus, resulting in genomes that are a mosaic of discrete segments derived primarily from these few sources. The cover image shows photographs of several strains with the segmental phylogenetic relationships within adjacent segments of an interval of mouse chromosome 5 among different strains depicted below. The top and middle panels show the locations of unique sequences represented on high-density arrays and identified SNPs, respectively. The bottom panel shows the segmental block locations (numbered), the boundaries of which were determined by analyzing transition points between high SNP and low SNP blocks for all 78 pairwise sequence comparisons of the 13 inbred classical strains. The phylogenetic relationships of the 15 inbred mouse strains (color-coded squares) are shown for each segment. The results of this study carry significant implications for SNP-based "association-style" scans across panels of inbred strains for complex trait mapping, as well as determining the number of strains needed for exhaustive SNP discovery across the genome. (For details, see Frazer et al., pp. 1493–1500 [Cover art by J. Clifton Meek. Photograph of JAX® mouse (DBA/2J), at top center, by Stanton Short, courtesy of The Jackson Laboratory.])