This data set includes estimate of gene expression for 35 genetically uniform lines of mice: C57BL/6J (B6, or simply B), DBA/2J (D2 or D), their B6D2 F1 intercross, and 32 BXD recombinant inbred (RI) strains derived by crossing female B6 mice with male D2 mice and then inbreeding progeny for over 21 generations. This set of RI strains is a remarkable resource because many of these strains have been extensively phenotyped for hundreds of interesting traits over a 25-year period. A significant advantage of this RI set is that the two parental strains (B6 and D2) have both been extensively sequenced and are known to differ at approximately 1.8 million SNPs. Coding variants (mostly single nucleotide polymorphisms and insertion-deletions) that may produce interesting phenotypes can be rapidly identified in this particular RI set.

BXD1 through BXD32 were produced by Benjamin A. Taylor starting in the late 1970s. BXD33 through BXD42 were also produced by Taylor, but from a second set of crosses initiated in the early 1990s. These strains are all available from the Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine. BXD43 through BXD99 were produced by Lu Lu, Jeremy Peirce, Lee M. Silver, and Robert W. Williams in the late 1990s and early 2000s using advanced intercross progeny (Peirce et al. 2004). Only two of these incipient strains are included in the current database (BXD67 and BXD68).

In this mRNA expression database we generally used progeny of stock obtained from The Jackson Laboratory between 1999 and 2001. Animals were generated in-house at the University of Alabama by John Mountz and Hui-Chen Hsu and at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center by Lu Lu and Robert Williams.

The table below lists the arrays by strain, sex, and age. Each array was hybridized to a pool of mRNA from three mice.