The NEI Central Transgenic Animal Facility, now part of the new NEI Genetic Engineering Core, is a research support facility for all NEI and NIDCD intramural researchers requiring the use of transgenic mice in their research programs. We are currently providing transgenic animal support to researchers from many laboratories/branches in the NEI and to several researchers in NIDCD. Since our program started in 1991, it has handled approximately 351 DNA constructs for generation of transgenic mice, and 37 lines of targeted ES cells for generation of chimeric mice. Researchers, using molecular biology techniques to study the eye, submit DNA constructs to our section for production of transgenic mice. We create transgenic mice by standard procedures, then biopsy and perform DNA analysis on the mice which are born from these procedures to identify transgene positive mice. At the researchers' request, we mate positive transgenic mice, wean litters, biopsy and analyze DNA from successive generations of transgenic mice, provide the transgenic animals to researchers for use in their experiments, and cryopreserve and bank embryos from important mouse lines (both transgenic and naturally occurring) for long term storage. For generating gene knockout mice, we perform ES cell injections into blastocysts. We also help researchers design transgenic projects and transgene/knockout vectors on a collaborative basis. ? ? This year we have: ? * accepted 18 new DNA constructs for transgenic mouse production;? * generated 76 transgenic founder mice;? * set up 379 matings of transgenic mice;? * weaned, tagged and tail biopsied 2369 mice;? * isolated DNA from 4,498 samples;? * performed 7,794 PCR genotyping analyses;? * cryopreserved 695 mouse embryos from one mouse line; ? * reconstituted 1 mouse line from frozen stock? * generated 58 highly chimeric mice from 20 ES cell lines.
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