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Breeding knock out mice


Revenged

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Well, you'd probably start with making the knock out in 2 or 4 mice, half male half female, and breed the rest of them from these initial pairs. It would be far too difficult and expensive to artificially knock out all 50. Though breeding babies makes things a little more tricky if you need them all to be the same age, or have a specific gender ratio. How important that is depends of course on the nature of the experiment you're trying to conduct.

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Well surely with the age thing, you don't need to do the experiment on all 50 at the same time, just on each individual mouse when they get to the correct age?

 

As for how you'd make that many mice, either by breeding fewer mouse without the specific gene until you get enough, or by spending a hell of a lot of money. Are you a millionaire?

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Well surely with the age thing, you don't need to do the experiment on all 50 at the same time, just on each individual mouse when they get to the correct age?

 

Hopefully, but like I said, it depends on what kind of experiment you're doing. But that's what we do in our lab - we just test the mice when they're at the correct age. It might mean spreading out the tests into 4 or 5 repeats, but that's how it is.

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but how do you know that the knock out mice will breed knock out children?

 

couldn't the genetics change down the generations - (e.g. two people with IaIo type A blood have a 25% chance of giving birth to type O blood children)

 

is there any way to prevent such changes?

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Firstly, the parents should be able to pass down the mutation, because it is artificially created in them when they were embryos, so the mutation is in all their cells, including their gametes. Secondly, yes sometimes the mutation can be lost, especially if you're dealing with in inserted plasmid (I'm not familiar with the exact mechanics of making knock-outs). But there really isn't much you can do to prevent that. You must genotype all your pups, whether it be via PCR or RTPCR or Southern blot, before you use them in your experiments to ensure that they still have the inserted mutation.

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