Hii...while we see the literature, there are a lots of papers in different domains of science on KO mice, but hardly any studies on other KO rodents. So, I am very curious to know why it is so, if other rodents are selected for different studies then why not for KO studies?
Dear Meetu,
Mice are the laboratory animal species most closely related to humans for which the knockout technique can be applied. They are widely used in knockout experiments, especially those investigating genetic questions that relate to human physiology. Gene knockout in rats is much harder and has only been possible since 2003. A mouse is about 30 g. It is ' pregnant' for 21 +/-1 days. You get 4 generations in one year. It is convenient for genetic studies to have a model you can study for generations during a shorter period of time. A rat (300 g) eats more, takes up more space, more money, and is less easy to use for this purpose. To use a volunteering human would imply that the researcher probably is dead after 3 generations:)
Thanx so much Bogdan Jan Wlodarczyk · and Béatrice Marianne Ewalds-Kvist for giving your response. Upto now, after a lots of discussions, I understand only the easiness of manipulation in mice, but I am still not clear about the fact that if any kind of model is established in rat and if we want to see the effects in Knockout rodents, then we should use rat KO or go for mice KO?
There are now knock-out rats:
Knockout rats generated by embryo microinjection of TALENs
Laurent Tesson, Claire Usal, Séverine Ménoret, Elo Leung, Brett J Niles, Séverine Remy, Yolanda Santiago, Anna I Vincent, Xiangdong Meng, Lei Zhang, Philip D Gregory, Ignacio Anegon & Gregory J Cost
Nature Biotechnology 29, 695–696 (2011)
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Geoscience
- Asia
- India