The 500,000 euros (US$460,000) awarded to the archive by the commission will allow EMMA to improve its organization and start a new database of mouse strains.

EMMA is a collaboration between its main site at Monterotondo near Rome and branches in Germany, France, Sweden, Britain and Portugal. The new database will be housed at the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge. It will interface with a database at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, currently the main source of mutant mouse strains worldwide. EMMA's archive is available free to all academics, and the mice cost 200 euros per strain.

EMMA has had a difficult birth, typifying the problems that can beset cross-European ventures. It struggled to open at all in 1999, after failing to win sufficient support from either national governments or the European Commission (see Nature 402, 4; 1999). So far it has archived only about 100 mouse strains.

 

Broker: Hrabé de Angelis.

But its star appears to be rising following the appointment last autumn of its first director, Martin Hrabé de Angelis, of the Institute for Experimental Genetics at the GSF national research centre in Munich. Hrabé de Angelis has brokered an agreement between EMMA's sites to archive another 650 mouse strains over the next three years.

But EMMA's long-term funding is uncertain. The European Commission's sixth Framework programme for research has so far made no commitment to funding for existing research infrastructures.

http://www.emma.rm.cnr.it