The “MuTHER” (“Multiple Tissue Human Expression Resource”) project is undertaking a coordinated program of analysis designed to understand the relationships between genome sequence variation, methylation status, mRNA expression and disease phenotypes.  The project aims to develop a resource of detailed genetic (genome-wide association; resequence) and genomic (expression; methylation) data from a range of tissues collected from a set of ~850 UK twins, as to support efforts to understand mechanisms involved in common trait susceptibility.

The specific aims of the MuTHER consortium are to:

Project description

The MuTHER project was established by the Wellcome Trust in 2007. Lymphocytes (LCLs and in some, fresh lymphocytes);  subcutaneous fat; muscle and skin biopsies have been obtained from ~856 twins (1/3 monozygotic, 2/3 dizygotic) from the well-characterised TwinsUK BioResource (link to TwinsUK).  All samples have been genome-wide expression profiled (Illumina HT-12v3 Chip) and genome-wide association data (Illumina 610k or 1M chip) and methylation data (27k Illumina array in first instance) will also be available shortly.