Can you breed sibling mice?

Relatively Simple Breeding Schemes To produce sufficient mice for experiments, multiple sister-brother breeding pairs or trios (two females and one male) can be established. Most strains produce more progeny per cage if mated as trios because all adult cage mates generally help care for the young.

How do you make a heterozygous mouse?

To do this:

1. 1) Look for alleles that are common between the experimental and control mice.
2. 2) Work the cross for each allele individually, then combine.
3. 1) Breed your homozygous loxP mice (most will be homs) to your cre transgenic strain, which will generate mice that are heterozygous loxP , hemizygous cre.

How long does it take to breed transgenic mice?

3. Expect litters within a month of mating since female mice go into estrus every 3 or 4 days and the gestation time of mice is 19-21 days. If no litters are produced after one month you should replace the mice that you are mating with your founder.

Can you inbred mice?

Inbred mouse strains are defined as colonies produced by a minimum of 20 generations of brother-sister mating, traceable to a single founding pair.

Can you keep two pregnant mice together?

The mice can be left together until the pups are ready to be weaned if the cage doesn’t get too crowded. For many strains, two pregnant females and their litters can be housed together until weaning, although you may find that particularly fecund strains like CD1 require that the cage be split to avoid overcrowding.

How many litters can a mouse have in a year?

10 litters
To make matters even more complicated, the female baby mouse is capable of reproduction at 6 weeks. So, they can start producing pups of their own and have about 10 litters of their own per year. In a theoretical situation, two mice that sneak into your home could give birth to 60 in a year.

How do you make a mouse unconscious?

When I want to stun a small mouse, I usually hold them still and flick them in the back of the head, hard! This will knock them out for a few seconds. I’ve always had success with this method, especially for smaller prey items.

How do you breed a double knockout mouse?

The most common practice is to mate the double heterozygotes together (AaBb x AaBb). Theoretically, one out of 16 progeny (6.25%) will be homozygous for both knockouts (aabb; see Figure 2). Be aware that it will take a lot of mice to get enough double homozygotes to build your colony.

What is a congenic strain?

A congenic strain is an inbred strain that contains a small genetic region (ideally a single gene) from another strain, but which is otherwise identical to the original inbred strain.

How many times can you inbred mice?

Through genetic drift, mouse genomes change enough in 20 consecutive inbred generations to be considered substrains of each other. Twenty inbred generations can occur over a course of about five years, which happens quickly in terms of experimental reproducibility.

How do you start a mouse breeding colony?

Murine Matchmaking: Starting a Breeding Colony of Mice

1. Plan In Advance. To establish your breeding colony, you’ll need to do a little forecasting.
2. Set Up the Breeding. Now it’s time to select a breeding pair.
3. Birthing. Check the cage starting on day 19 and record any births.
4. Weaning.
5. Maintaining Your Breeding Colony.

What is the breeding cycle of a mouse?

House mouse breeding cycle. Estrus refers to the phase when the female is sexually receptive or in heat. Commonly in females the estrous cycle lasts around four to five days and estrus itself lasts about 12 hours. A mouse’s estrous cycle is the changes in the animal brought on by reproductive hormones.

What is a knockin mouse and why is it used?

A knockout mouse is a laboratory mouse in which researchers have inactivated, or “knocked out,” an existing gene by replacing it or disrupting it with an artificial piece of DNA. What are knockout mice used for? Knocking out the activity of a gene provides valuable clues about what that gene normally does. Humans share many genes with mice.

Is a knockout mouse transgenic?

Currently, the phrase “transgenic mouse” generally refers to any mouse whose genome contains an inserted piece of DNA, originating from the mouse genome or from the genome of another species, and the term includes the standard transgenic mouse as well as a knockin or knockout mouse (see below).

What is the breeding age of a mouse?

Optimal Breeding Age and cycles. It is possible for female mice to start having litters as early as four weeks of age. The optimal age however is when the mouse is at least 12 weeks old, this greatly increases the chance of a safe delivery of healthy babies. The oldest age a female should be bred is around 8 months.