Colony management and breeding of transgenic lines

Our laboratory animal caretakers are skilled in maintaining mouse and rat colonies and breeding both simple and complex transgenic lines. The breeding setup is agreed upon with the PI and corrections and optimizations are made as the breeding progress. 

Collection of biopsies for genotyping or genetic monitoring

At Department of Biomedicine we strive to make sampling for genotyping as pain-free and non-invasive as possible. Therefore we use the surplus tissue from earmarking as biopsy material. We collaborate with TransnetYX, a company offering automated genotyping and genetic monitoring services. If you prefer not to run the genotyping protocols yourself, our breeding consultant, Karina Vestergaard Nielsen, can help you get started with TransnetYX. If you are interested, please reach out to Karina Vestergaard Nielsen at karinavn@biomed.au.dk. 

Guidance on advanced breeding, genetic drift, backcrossing and more

In The Laboratory Animal Facility we have a laboraotry animal technician, Karina Vestergaard Nielsen, with a special interest in breeding and genetics who primarily work as our local breeding consultant. We are very aware that genetic drift can be an issue when working with inbred and transgenic mouse strains and therefore we are establishing a maintenance and backcrossing program for use in our rodent colonies. We are using the guidelines published by The Jackson Laboratory. If you want to get an overview of the process of backcrossing and avoiding genetic drift you can see this blog post on backcrossing offered by Jax.

In that context, it is also relevant to know that we use dedicated strain names according to the guidelines set by the International Committee on Standardized Genetic Nomenclature for Mice. If you want to know more about how to apply correct and unambiguous genetic nomenclature or take a short interactive course on the subject, please refer to Jax's technical support page for genetics and nomenclature.

Lastly, we offer guidance and advice in selecting the correct genetic background for your transgenic strains, either to use for backcrossing or as controls in experiments. If you are in doubt of what genetic background your transgenic strain is on, we can help perform a genetic monitoring in collaboration with TransnetYX. Please see above for further details.

If you have questions, need help or want to know more, please contact Karina Vestergaard Nielsen at karinavn@biomed.au.dk.