August 21, 2010. One year ago, the first KO rats were reported, using the Zn-finger nucleases technology. Half a year earlier, several laboratories had reported the pionner isolation of true rat embryonic stems (ES) cells, including a manuscript published from Qi-Long Ying’s lab. Last week, this laboratory reported the generation of the first knockout rats obtained by homologous recombination in rat ES cells. Read more...

July 16, 2010. Marina Gertsenstein (member of ISTT) and her colleagues, from the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital and the Toronto Centre for Phenogenomics, in Toronto (ON, Canada), have recently published a scientific article in PLoS ONE describing the efficient generation of mouse chimeras with C57BL/6N ES cells by aggregation with standard albino outbred ICR morulas. Read more...

July 5, 2010. The International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT) has decided to co-sponsor the QTRN’s 6th Annual Symposium: Focus on new transgenic models and their phenotyping, organized by the Quebec Transgenic Research Network (QTRN), that will be held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on November 13, 2010. Read more...

June 30, 2010. The course on “Cryopreservation of Mouse Germoplasm” and the associated symposium on “Animal Models and Cryopreservation“, to be held in Campinas (Brazil), November 22-26, 2010, has released its new web site. These course and symposium are organized by the University of Campinas and the Multidisciplinary Center for Biological Investigation on Laboratory Animal Science, and it is co-sponsored by the International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT). Read more...

June 28, 2010. The symposium on “New generation GMOs: Refinement in procedures“, chaired by Belén Pintado and Jan Bas Prins, co-sponsored by the International Society forTransgenic Technologies (ISTT), organized within the Scand-FELASA 2010 meeting “New paradigms in laboratory animal science”, was held in Helsinki (Finland), on June 14-17, 2010. Read more...

June 26, 2010. New images have been added to the ISTT collection of mouse pictures. Our colleague, Sergey Kupriyanov (The Scripps Research Institute, Mouse Genetics Core, La Jolla, CA, USA), has contributed with new pictures of beautiful “white creamy” mouse chimeras, obtained by injecting E14 ES cells into an albino blastocyst. Read more...

June 17, 2010. A new book on genetics of mouse pigmentation has been just published, entitled “The colors of mice: a model genetic network” by M. Lynn Lamoreux, Véronique Delmas, Lionel Larue and Dorothy C. Bennett (Wiley, 2010). Read more...

June 8, 2010. Next week, on June 14-17, will be held the FELASA 2010 meeting in Helsinki (Finland), devoted to “New Paradigms in Laboratory Animal Science”. This meeting is co-sponsored by ISTT. Current ISTT Treasurer, Belen Pintado, co-chairs a workshop on “New generation GMOs from a laboratory animal perspective“. Read more...

May 31, 2010. A manuscript entitled “Genetic polymorphisms among C57BL/6 mouse inbred strains” has been just published by Esther Zurita, Mónica Chagoyen, Marta Cantero, Rosario Alonso, Anna González-Neira, Alejandro López-Jiménez, José Antonio López-Moreno, Carlisle P. Landel, Javier Benítez, Florencio Pazos and Lluís Montoliu in Transgenic Research. The Illumina® Mouse Medium Density Linkage Mapping panel, with 1,449 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), was used to genotype individuals from ten C57BL/6-related strains. Read more...

May 17, 2010. The International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT) web site includes a list of transgenic laboratories and facilities located around the world. In addition, the web page now features a Google Maps script that indicates the geographical location of each of the transgenic facilities listed. Read more...