Is the mother lode of interesting
tagged mice if you are interested in the brain
Bac Pac resources, a great place to buy your BAC
What Cre recombinase is, and why you want to use it in conjunction with transgenic mice technologies:
Cre recombinase catalyzes the recombination of DNA at 13-bp sites called loxPsites. Giving scientists the ability to control when and in what tissues genes are knocked out or activated, it has become one of the most useful tools available in developmental biology. Want a transgenic mouse with a gene knocked out in only epithelial cells? Find a transgenic mouse expressing Cre recombinase only in the epithelium, flank your gene with loxPsites in another mouse (that gene is then said to be "floxed"), and cross the two. Want to activate a gene starting from postnatal day 5? Find a mouse with Cre recombinase being driven by a promoter that becomes active at P5, place a floxed stop sequence between your gene and its promoter in another mouse, and cross the two. Where can you find these coveted Cre transgenic mice? Try these excellent resources as your starting point:
• From Andras Nagy's lab, a list of published Cre transgenic mouse lines, complete with e-mail addresses of whom to contact for more info.
• Fill out a query form at the Jackson Laboratories JAX MICE Database page - with hundreds of thousands of transgenic mice, they may have just the strain you're looking for.
• The Transgenic Mice link on Lothar Hennighausen's Biology of the Mammary Gland page at NIH is a wonderful resource, complete with lots of information on each transgenic mouse and the research surrounding it. For more information on Cre recombinase in transgenic mice research, try his Cre/lox recombination system page.
• Another good-to-know-about page is the lab webpage of Joe Tsien, creator of the "Smart Mouse."
The McLaughlin Research Institute is a mouse research facility in Great Falls Montana. This is a wonderful institute where many of our friends and collaborators work.
Bright green, fluorescent cone photoreceptors
Breeding pairs of these transgenic mice can be readily obtained from Harlan, which is distributing the line as a part of the MMRRC, a federally funded distribution system.
Published Names:
R6.85933
B6.SJL-Tg(OPN1LW-GFP)85933Hue/Hsd (former MMRRC designation)
The description of this mouse line was first published in the journal Visual Neuroscience and can be found here.
Fei & Hughes
Dr. Yijian Fei in our laboratory built these mice. The cone photoreceptors of living mice can be imaged over time because they express the jellyfish green fluorescent protein. To the right is a 3D reconstruction of a living cone photoreceptor in a mouse eye. Because it is possible to image these cells in living tissue, it is now possible for scientists to record from, and learn more about, how cone photoreceptors actually work.
This work was supported by the E. Matilda Zieger Foundation