Publication in Transgenic Research, July 2015
Blastocyst genotyping for quality control of mouse mutant archives: an ethical and economical approach.
August 26, 2015
Mutant mouse strains generated and phenotyped by the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium are made available to the research community via public repositories, mostly as cryopreserved sperm or embryos. To ensure the quality of this frozen resource there is a requirement that for each strain the frozen sperm/embryos are proven able to produce viable mutant progeny, before the live animal resource is removed from cages. Given the current requirement to generate live pups to demonstrate their mutant genotype, this quality control check necessitates the use and generation of many animals and requires considerable time, cage space, technical and economic resources.
In a recent publication the authors, most of which contribute to the INFRAFRONTIER Research Infrastructure, describe a simple and efficient method of genotyping pre-implantation stage blastocysts with significant ethical and economic advantages especially beneficial for current and future large-scale mouse mutagenesis projects.