The NIH Xenopus Initiative is establishing many of the genetic and genomic resources that have been recommended by the Xenopus research community. These resources include cDNA libraries, expressed sequence tags, full-length cDNA sequences, genomic libraries, pilot projects to mutagenize and phenotype X. tropicalis, and sequencing the X. tropicalis genome. This review describes the status of these projects and explains how to access their data and resources. Current information about these activities is available on the NIH Xenopus Web site (http://www.nih.gov/science/models/xenopus/).
The National Institutes of Health Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC) Program is a multiinstitutional effort to identify and sequence a cDNA clone containing a complete ORF for each human and mouse gene. ESTs were generated from libraries enriched for full-length cDNAs and analyzed to identify candidate full-ORF clones, which then were sequenced to high accuracy. The MGC has currently sequenced and verified the full ORF for a nonredundant set of >9,000 human and >6,000 mouse genes. Candidate full-ORF clones for an additional 7,800 human and 3,500 mouse genes also have been identified. All MGC sequences and clones are available without restriction through public databases and clone distribution networks (see http:mgc.nci.nih.gov).