First published online February 10, 2005
Development 132, 502e (2005)
© The Company of Biologists Limited
Transgenic chickens get the green light
Hens that lay transgenic eggs could both greatly facilitate the study of
embryonic development and provide bioreactors for the pharmaceutical industry;
however, generating them has proved technically difficult. Chapman and
colleagues have now cracked this challenge to produce homozygous roosters and
hens that ubiquitously express enhanced green fluorescent proteins (eGFP; see
p. 935). By injecting a
replication-defective lentiviral vector expressing eGFP under the control of
the phosphoglycerol kinase promoter into fertilised eggs, the researchers
managed to create a rooster that carried the transgene in his germline. From
this starting point, the authors then bred homozygous individuals that
expressed eGFP uniformly throughout their tissues, which could be detected by
in situ hybridization and immunocytochemistry. This paper thus shows that
ubiquitous transgene expression is achievable in chickens and opens the way to
deriving other transgenic chickens for use in developmental
studies.
Related articles in Development:
- Ubiquitous GFP expression in transgenic chickens using a lentiviral vector
- Susan C. Chapman, Aaron Lawson, William C. MacArthur, Russell J. Wiese, Robert H. Loechel, Maria Burgos-Trinidad, John K. Wakefield, Ram Ramabhadran, Teri Jo Mauch, and Gary C. Schoenwolf
Development 2005 132: 935-940.
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