The small Maf transcription factor proteins bind to Maf Recognition Elements (MAREs) by dimerizing with CNC proteins or themselves. We undertook experiments to clarify the functional relationship between the small Mafs and their partners in vivo. Embryos expressing abundant transgene-derived MafK died of severe anemia, while lines expressing lower levels of small Maf lived to adulthood. Megakar...

Microinjection of DNA constructs into fertilized mouse oocytes typically results in random transgene integration at a single genomic locus. The resulting transgenic founders can be used to establish hemizygous transgenic mouse lines. However, practical and experimental reasons often require that such lines be bred to homozygosity. Transgene zygosity can be determined by progeny testing assays w...

The Warsaw High Preferring (WHP) and Warsaw Low Preferring (WLP) lines were bred from Wistar foundation stock to obtain lines of rats that differ in their preference for ethanol (EtOH) solutions. The WHP line has met major criteria for an animal model of alcoholism. The WHP rats voluntarily drink excessive amounts of alcohol while the WLP rats consume negligible amounts of alcohol. These patter...

Six inbred strains of adult mice either obtained from commercial suppliers or bred in the author's laboratory at Waterloo were assessed for size of body, brain and corpus callosum (CC) at a wide range of ages. Because almost all measures varied significantly with age, a simple regression procedure was used to minimize age effects statistically. The strains A/J, C57BL/6J and DBA/2J differed subs...

A serosurvey for Pneumocystis carinii infection of laboratory-bred and wild-born monkeys was made by the indirect immunofluorescence method. The antibody titers of wild cynomolgus (Macaca fascicularis) and Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata fuscata) to P. carinii (Pc) were higher than those of laboratory-bred cynomolgus monkeys; 54.9% of the wild cynomolgus and 40% of Japanese monkeys had antibod...

Observations utilized in providing material for the interpretation of orientation during the upward geotropic progression of young rats have been secured from three inbred lines of R. norvegicus, 1 hybrid descendents from two of these, ~ and one line of R. rattus. 1 I t has been desirable to obtain comparable data upon certain other lines. Experiments were undertaken with individuals of a line ...

To test the hypothesis that selective breeding for high voluntary wheel running negatively affects maternal performance in house mice, we observed maternal behavior and compared litter size and mass, in replicate lines of selected (N=4) and control (N=4) mice from generations 20 and 21 of an artificial selection experiment. At generation 21, selected-line females ran 2.8-times more revolutions ...

Bred vectors are a type of finite perturbation used in prediction studies of atmospheric models that exhibit spatially extended chaos. We study the structure, spatial correlations, and the growth rates of logarithmic bred vectors (which are constructed by using a given norm). We find that, after a suitable transformation, logarithmic bred vectors are roughly piecewise copies of the leading Lyap...

House mouse lines bidirectionally selected for nest-building behavior show a correlation between number of AVP cells in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN), the master circadian clock in mammals, and level of nest-building behavior as well as a correlation between wheel-running activity and SCN AVP content. Similar genetic correlations between wheel-running activity and nest-building behavior have...

Conditional gene targeting has been extensively used for in vivo analysis of gene function in adipocyte cell biology but often with debate over the tissue specificity and the efficacy of inactivation. To directly compare the specificity and efficacy of different Cre lines in mediating adipocyte specific recombination, transgenic Cre lines driven by the adipocyte protein 2 (aP2) and adiponectin ...