From today’s Business section:

Blessed with the unusual ability to regrow the lens of its eye, and laying eggs big enough to study and manipulate, the frog is prized by scientists who want to explore things as diverse as birth defects and organ regeneration.

But unlike other workhorses of science, the frogs did not have a real home base. Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, maintains different genetic strains of lab mice. The Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center at Indiana University collects and distributes lines of fruit flies. And the Zebrafish International Resource Center in Oregon stocks the fish. Now, a five-year, $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will support a national Xenopus center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.