Latest News Title Laser surgery for mouse geneticists Name Admin Date 07-07-19 17:24    4-34 Jackson-Labs-nature-Biotech-Jan-2007.pdf (538.8K), Down : 13, 2007-07-19 17:24:32 ********** A rapid, new approach for generating mutant mice from embryonic stem cells may accelerate high-throughput phenotype analysis. The ablity to select and identify embryonic stem(ES) cell clones with targeted and knock-out mutations has revolutionized the use of the mouse as a model organism for studying human disease. To facilitate gene function assignment, worldwide efforts are underway to generate an ES cell resource with a knock-out mutation in every gene in the mouse genome. In this issue, Poueymirou st al. describe a procedure that has thepotential to greatly increase the speed and effiency of phenotyping mice from EScells. ....What all this means is that the mouse geneticscommunity now has at its disposal a new approach that enables efficient, cost-effective generation of mice that can be bred and phenotyped directly. The greatest potential for this new technology will likely be in high-throughput efforts to phenotype mutations generated in large-scale ES cell mutagenesis screens. If the ES cell mutation exhibits a dominant phenotype, F0 animals heterozygous for the mutation can be analyzed directly. The identification of recessive traits will require production of homozygotes. This can be done in two ways using the eight-cell microinjection procedure. ....The new laser-assisted eight-cell microinjection procedure will be useful not only for carrying out phenotypic analysis more quickly but also for enhancing the analysis of mutations that cause dominant developmental lethalities and fertility defects. In addition, Poueymirou et al. show that F0 germline mice can be efficiently produced using various combinations of inbred ES cell lines with inbred or outbred host embryos. This will likely increase the ease of obtaining germline transmission from ES cells derived from a wide range of inbred mouse strains8,9 and may help facilitate increasingly complex genetic experiments involving the manipulation of different inbredstrains of ES cells. Thomas Gridley & Rick Woychik / The Jackson Laboratory, USA 2007 Nature Publishing Group  http://www.nature.com/naturebiotechnology