Wednesday 6 August 2008

Freezing Mouse Sperm: A New, Efficient, Cost-Effective Method

�
A new, simple, sparing process of freezing black eye sperm while
achieving high subsequent fertilization rates will help researchers
using black eye models of human disease, according to an article released
on July 29, 2008 in the open access daybook PLoS ONE.





Thanks to the similarities betwixt humans and mice in genetic computer code and
physiology, they are very often used as model organisms for diseases
effecting humans, especially those of genetic origin. Combined with
their fast reproductive rates and relatively cheap maintenance, the
standard of using mice in scientific experiments is wide-spread. To
facilitate this, mouse sperm are often wintry to conserve and
distribute certain genic combinations in the research and clinical
worlds. Unfortunately, when the sperm from the to the highest degree popular mouse
strain, the�C57BL/6 or "Black 6," are frozen, they woefully
underperform.




The Jackson Laboratory, known for its study and breeding of mice for
mammalian genetics research, has previously addressed this problem by
freeze and storing fertilized mouse embryos in a process called
cryopreservation. This direction, rare strains could be preserved. However,
this process is much less efficient than freezing spermatozoan, and the
reanimation process can cause many failures.�"If you freeze 250
embryos," Dr. Wiles, an writer on the study aforesaid, "you privy only weigh
on about 125 live pups. But a single male mouse
can raise millions of sperm, which can give rise to 100s or even
1,000s of offspring.� Thus, devising sperm cryopreservation work
has long
been a goal of ours."




In an effort to resolve this inefficiency in the Black 6 mice, Drs.
Michael Wiles and Chuck Ostermeier in Jackson's Technology
Evaluation and Development group, and Dr. Robert Taft and Ms. Jane
Farley in the Reproductive Sciences group of Jackson Laboratories have
published this new technique, which has gained the pursuit of both
academic and pharmaceutical laboratories. In this process, the sperm
ar collected into cocktail composed of raffinose sugar, plane milk, and
monothioglycerol antioxidant. This mix is suspended and loaded into
belittled tubes, and so slowly cooled before existence stored in liquid nitrogen,
which has a temperature of about -200 degrees Celsius. When needed for
fertilization of mouse eggs, they ar thawed and incubated in an in
vitro fecundation media for approximately one hour earlier
the oocytes are added in clusters.




This technique is reported to fertilise at a rate of 70%. This marks a
rate six times the previous rates of other mouse sperm cell freezing
techniques. According to Dr. Wiles, the mouse model is so predominant in
skill that "the world research community is making literally
thousands of new mouse models." This new technique would help reduce
costs and make this research more conciliatory. "The problem is that it
costs about $10,000 a year to maintain a particular mouse strain, and
worldwide only a few hundred strains are in actual laboratory
experiments at any given time."



About PLoS ONE




All works published in PLoS
ONE
are open-access. Everything is immediately available - to read,
download, redistribute, include in databases and otherwise use -
without cost to anyone, anywhere, subject only to the condition that
the original authorship and source ar properly attributed. Copyright
is retained by the authors. The Public Library of Science uses the
Creative Commons Attribution License.



PLoS ONE is the
first journal of primary research from all areas of science to engage
both pre- and post-publication peer review to maximize the wallop of
every report it publishes. PLoS ONE is published by
the Public
Library of Science (PLoS), the Open-access publisher whose goal is to
make the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.



About The Jackson Laboratory




The Jackson Laboratory is a nonprofit research laboratory with 37
inquiry groups investigation the genetic basis of human diseases. In
addition, the
Laboratory has a unique role of creating, maintaining and distributing
mouse models to the global research residential district. More than 3,D mouse
models
are usable from the Laboratory, far more than any other source. Drs.
Taft, Wiles and Ostermeier, Ms. Farley and others ca-ca up the
Laboratory's
team of imagination scientists wHO innovate techniques to amend and
streamline mouse model-based research.



Conserving, Distributing and Managing Genetically Modified
Mouse Lines by Sperm Cryopreservation.


Ostermeier GC, Wiles MV, Farley JS, Taft RA

PLoS ONE 3(7): e2792.


doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002792


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Here For Full Length Article




Written by Anna Sophia McKenney



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