The Ability of EK Cells to Form Chimeras after Selection of Clones in G418 and Some Observations on the Integration of Retroviral Vector Proviral DNA into EK Cells

  1. M.J. Evans,
  2. A. Bradley,
  3. M.R. Kuehn, and
  4. E.J. Robertson
  1. University of Cambridge, Department of Genetics, Cambridge CB2 3EH, England

This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.

Excerpt

The use of tumor-derived embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells and embryo-derived stem cells (EK cells) as models for studying aspects of early mouse embryogenesis is well established (Evans et al. 1983). The advent both of methods for establishing primary cultures of pluripotential cells directly from the embryo (Evans and Kaufman 1981; Martin 1981) and of the ability to maintain these cells in a fully totipotential and karyotypically unaltered form during in vitro culture (Robertson et al. 1983; Evans et al. 1985) reopens the issue of the practicality of attempting to assay in vivo, mutants produced in vitro.

We have shown that 15 EK cell lines of separate origins are able to contribute to chimeras and that the overall efficiency of chimera production is high (Table 1). Approximately two-thirds of injected blastocysts transferred to foster mothers in which pregnancy is established are recovered as live-born mice, and in recent experimental series over...

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