FLICKR, STEFANOPassenger mutations—unwanted alterations that accompany intentional genetic modifications—can confound experiments using certain types of transgenic mice. According to an analysis published today (July 7) in Immunity, passenger mutations are widespread in these animal models and can, in cases, significantly impact experimental results.
“This is a big problem. It affects us all,” said study coauthor Tom Vanden Berghe, a postdoc studying cell death in the lab of Peter Vandenabeele at the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie and Ghent University’s Inflammation Research Center in Belgium. “We made a web tool [where] people can put in their knockout [and] how many times they are backcrossed. Then they get a list of all possible passenger mutations.”
The new tool “empowers the scientific community to look a little closer” at the transgenic mice they are using, said Soren Warming, a senior scientist at Genentech who was not involved in the study.
Passenger mutations affect experiments using transgenic animals models called congenic mice, whose modified genetic material comes from a different genetic background than ...
