Munich

The financial crisis facing the European Bioinformatics Institute (see above) is also threatening the European Mouse Mutant Archive (EMMA). The archive, which has its main site at Monterotondo near Rome, has had its application for European Union (EU) infrastructure funding turned down.

The application was coordinated by Davor Solter, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg, and a member of the programme committee that selects strains to be held at EMMA and its nodes in France, Britain and Sweden.

The funding request covered “basic activities required for acceptance of mutant strains, freezing of sperm and embryos, and molecular characterization of the strains”.

EMMA was set up with grants totalling 3.9 million euros (US$4.1 million) from the biotechnology infrastructure programme within the EU's fourth Framework programme (FP4), and with support from national organizations. It was created in response to the demand for mutant mice for the study of the function of sequenced genes.

Scientists and European Commission officials involved in negotiating EU grants in 1996 and 1997 expected continued funding in subsequent EU framework programmes.

But even then, EMMA scientists viewed the short-term nature of the funding as unsatisfactory for a facility that cannot be temporarily closed pending new grants. “You can't put the mice on a shelf and ask them to wait for the next grant before they get their next feed,” says Solter.

Now that EU funding has dried up, this dissatisfaction has turned to panic. The FP4 funds ran out in spring this year, at around the time that EMMA officially opened (see Nature 398, 183; 1999). The archive is being temporarily funded by the Italian research council, the CNR, although it was nervous about funding building and running costs.

Solter did not realize that the wording of the programme on which he based his application, which excludes “support for the construction and operation of research infrastructures, as well as for the collection of data”, meant that running costs were excluded. “I sort of assumed ‘operation’ was referring to water and electricity,” he says.

Commission officials are encouraging EMMA, like EBI, to reapply for FP5 money for research projects, which they say is all that the infrastructure programme can cover. There is certainly plenty of money available: funding for infrastructure within the life-sciences programme of FP5 totals 60 million euros, of which 12 million euros was available for the first round, but only 5 million euros has been allocated.

But a more stable solution is also being sought. “We need a constructive and timely alternative, such as a direct contribution from the European Union to operate EMMA,” says Glauco Tocchini-Valentini, director of the CNR Institute of Cell Biology at Monterotondo, and CNR representative on EMMA's science-policy committee.

One commission official thinks that EMMA may be harder to rescue than EBI, which is well established and has multi-lateral support within EMBL. In contrast, he says, EMMA is covered by one national research council, and it may need member states to rally to its cause and create a new multilateral legal entity.