The country''s first National Facility for Transgenic and Gene Knock-Out Mice was inaugurated at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) by Dr Manju Sharma, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, on Thursday. Dr Sharma also officially inaugurated the recently set-up Florescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS), an important tool for the analysis and sorting of animal and plant cells. While the National Facility for Transgenic and Knock-Out Mice has been set up at a cost of Rs 6 crore with funds from CSIR and the Department of Science & Technology (DST), the Rs 2.5 crore FACS project has been funded by CSIR and the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

After inaugurating the two facilities, Dr Sharma said India was in a unique position to take any cutting edge research in biology. She said the setting up of the two latest molecular biology techniques had opened up new vistas in the field of drug discovery and functional genomics.

The new facilities would also help understand the disease profile, the causes as also the development of new drugs, vaccines and procedures to prevent the outbreak of diseases.

Dr Lalji Singh, Director of CCMB, said the Institute would procure mice strains from abroad and breed them here. The mice strains would be used for developing drugs for Alzheimer''s disease, hepatitis-B, colon cancer, leukemia and certain brain disorders. Dr Singh welcomed industry''s participation in promoting the animal house. He said CCMB would breed the imported animal models and sell them to the industry or let the latter use the technology at the Institute by paying a reasonable fee.

Addressing a large gathering of scientists and staff of CCMB, Dr Sharma said research institutions like CCBM, IICT and CDFD should use each other''s facilities, rather than duplicating the facilities. She said this was the era of mega scientific research and there was no place for individual or isolated research. It was, therefore, necessary that research institutes teamed up with other institutes, industry and even universities for new inventions and innovations.

Dr Sharma said the biotech market would be worth Rs 4.5 billion in the year 2005, and she asked the Directors of the three research institutes under the CSIR to equip them for the projected growth. She said without innovation the country would not achieve anything.

Dr Sharma said institutes like CCMB should be known to the general public, and to make the institutes well known, they should develop one or two products with cutting edge. The institutes should be known by their products, she said.

Referring to Dr Rao V Ayagiri''s (of the Department of Science &Technology), concern about the lack of interest among students to take up research, Dr Sharma said training of students / researchers was very important. She asked the Directors of CCMB and IICT to take up the challenge and work out a training programme for scientists. She also called for refresher courses for young scientists and enrolment of more people in research institutes. This was essential for good quality research. She said there was a proposal to encourage women scientists.

Giving the functioning of the two new facilities, Dr Lalji Singh said with the advent of DNA technology it was now possible to identify gene or genes for a specific human disease and transfer the same into a mouse embryo to produce a transgenic animal. These Transgenic mice harbour the disease gene and efficiently express the disease among the progeny. Yet another method of creating an animal model for human disease was by disrupting the normal gene function by the introduction of a defective gene. The process is known as production of knock-out mice. CCMB has created necessary infrastructure to generate new transgenic and knock-out mice models to understand gene function and its regulation.

CCMB scientists had recently cloned a novel gene namely wd13, which is predicted to have a role in sex determination. To understand the functional significance of this novel gene, the newly established national facility has just produced the first knock-out strain of mice lacking wd13 gene. The resultant mice showed poor pre-weaning growth performance. Transgenic mice line was also produced with this novel gene. Like the knock-out gene, the transgenic offspring also showed poor pre-weaning growth performance. These genetically engineered mice would help understand the functions of the novel gene.

The instruments of FACS, known as FACS Vantage and FACS Calibur, are primarily used for basic research in immunology, cell biology, and developmental biology. They are also very useful for clinical research and diagnosis of diseases, particularly for AIDS. The cell sorting facility is very useful in stem cell research where a variety of stem cells from the bone marrow, brain, skin, liver etc. can be sorted and used by the scientists of CCMB as well as many other research institutions in the country.

The setting up of the biotech facilities is considered as a major boost for the research work at CCMB, which is celebrating its Silver Jubilee in November.