Access to Resources

Identifying and selecting the most appropriate animal model is a challenge, but the U.S. Federal Government’s National Institutes of Health, has supported several efforts to make the job of finding disease models easier. These efforts began with support for databases about specific species, and have graduated to support for discipline-specific studies and cross-species resources. This article tracks LAMHDI, the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human DIsease ( www.lamhdi.org ), which brings together data about five species: flies, mice, rats, yeast, and zebrafish, and allows scientists to search across these data, principally by disease and gene. This chapter explains how LAMHDI was conceived, and where LAMHDI hopes to go in moving into phenotypical as well as genotypical data through networks and visualization.