Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-26-2013
Abstract
Chromosomal integrity has been known for many years to affect the ability of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) to contribute to the germline of chimeric mice. Abnormal chromosomes are generally detected by standard cytogenetic karyotyping. However, this method is expensive, time consuming, and often omitted prior to blastocyst injection, consequently reducing the frequency of mESC-derived offspring. Here, we show a fast, accurate, and inexpensive screen for identifying the two most common aneuploidies (Trisomy 8 and loss of chromosome Y) in genetically manipulated mESCs using quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR). Screening against these two aneuploidies significantly increases the fraction of normal mESC clones. Our method is extremely sensitive and can detect as low as 10% aneuploidy among a large population of mESCs. It greatly expedites the generation of mutant mice and provides a quick tool for assessing the aneuploidy percentages of any mESC line.
Comments
This article originally appeared in Stem Cell Reports, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.stemcr.2013.08.003
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.