Removing the cloak of invisibility: phenotyping the mouse

Abstract

If you study a human disease, it is likely that you have tried to generate a mouse model. Sometimes, these models are excellent; others are disappointing. Or, so we think. How often does our mouse mutant not model the human disease because of limitations in how we may look at it? In any living organism, many factors work together to produce the phenotype. Here, new phenotyping paradigms for assessing mouse biology and physiology are described and proposed. Advances in mouse phenotype assessments have paralleled human clinical diagnostics. The future brings a multitude of mouse strains that might be exposed to a variety of conditions. To assess health will require the ability to perform a broad-based phenotype assessment of every animal until we can understand how the perturbation of one system affects others.