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New tools for defining the 'genetic background' of inbred mouse strains

Nature Immunology volume 8, pages 669–673 (2007)Cite this article

There is general appreciation that 'genetic background effects' can profoundly affect the immune phenotypes of congenic, transgenic and knockout mice. We suggest that attributing phenotypes to genetic background effects is outmoded and that new databases containing single-nucleotide polymorphisms obtained with a group of inbred mouse strains can be used to define the flanking DNA of nearly all mouse genes.

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Figure 1: The flanking-gene problem, demonstrated by hypothetical congenic, transgenic and knockout intervals crossed onto the NOD background.
Figure 2: SNP maps generated from the T1Dbase website (http://dil.t1dbase.org/page/PerlegenSNPs).

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Acknowledgements

Supported by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (L.S.W.), the Wellcome Trust (L.S.W.), the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (W.M.R.) and the Autoimmunity Center of Excellence program (W.M.R.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. William M. Ridgway is in the Division of Rheumatology and Immunology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15218, USA. ridgway2+@pitt.edu,

    William M Ridgway

  2. Department of Medical Genetics, Barry Healy, Luc J. Smink, Dan Rainbow and Linda S. Wicker are in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation/Wellcome Trust, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 0XY, UK. linda.wicker@cimr.cam.ac.uk,

    Barry Healy, Luc J Smink, Dan Rainbow & Linda S Wicker

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Ridgway, W., Healy, B., Smink, L. et al. New tools for defining the 'genetic background' of inbred mouse strains. Nat Immunol 8, 669–673 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/ni0707-669

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