RATS have suddenly become a little more appealing, for geneticists at least.
The rodents are used extensively in medical research. But while geneticists can disrupt or “knock out” both copies of genes in mice, the techniques used to create knock-out mice have not proved effective in rats.
So researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed a new method. They injected male rats with mutagenic chemicals and studied their offspring for disruption in two genes associated with breast cancer, Brca1 and Brca2 (Nature Biotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/nbt830). Rats carrying defective copies of the gene were then mated to create animals with two…
