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 ~1000 UK twins, as to support efforts to understand mechanisms involved in common trait susceptibility.

Project description

The MuTHER project was established by the Wellcome Trust in 2007. Lymphocytes (LCLs and in some, fresh lymphocytes); fat; muscle and skin biopsies have been obtained from a maximum of 855 twins (318 monozygotic, 537 dizygotic) from the well-characterised UK Twins Resource.  Genome-wide expression profiling of all samples is near complete and genome-wide association data (Illumina 610k or 1M chip) and methylation data (27k Illumina array in first instance) will also be available shortly.