Large-scale phenotyping projects such as the Sanger Mouse Genetics project are ongoing efforts to help identify the influences of genes and their modification on phenotypes. Gene-phenotype relations are crucial to the improvement of our understanding of human heritable diseases as well as the development of drugs. However, given that there are xe2x88xbc: 20 000 genes in higher vertebrate genomes and the experimental verification of gene-phenotype relations requires a lot of resources, methods are needed that determine good candidates for testing.