Accelerate Your Rodent Breeding Programs with IVF and Speed Congenics

Sep 09 2010

In today’s research environment, speed and efficiency are critical for evaluating genetically modified animal models to determine their suitability for research. Additionally, as more and more models are created, some of them face reproductive challenges that impede the evaluation process. To assist researchers with these growing challenges, IVF technology can be employed. This webinar discusses the use of IVF to assist the research community in overcoming reproductive issues, timelines and efficiency with their genetically modified mouse colonies.

Backcrossing a chromosomal region from one strain background to another has been used for many years to produce congenic animals. These animals are desirable since they will represent a mostly genetically homogeneous experimental population for further study of the affect of the region of interest (a knocked out gene, for example). Using traditional methods, 10 generations of backcrossing are required before a line is considered fully backcrossed. This translates into about 2 years of time for most projects of this type. At each generation, approximately one-half of the loci are fixed for the desired background, but in reality, the population consists of individuals that may have a higher (or lower) percentage of alleles fixed. Speed congenics, otherwise known as accelerated backcrossing, utilizes molecular genetic methods to identify the animals that have a higher percentage of the desired background so that they may be selected and used as breeders for the subsequent generation. Utilizing this method, the time to full congenicity is cut in half. In this webinar we provide details on how speed congenics can be employed to accelerate putting your model on a congenic background.

Presenters
Steve Sansing, Senior Manager of Embryology
Bruce J. Elder, PhD, Director of Corporate Rodent Genetics