How to visualize tumor cells in mice with out sacrificing the animals - (Mar/10/2010 )

I have no experience with animal work so far. We are thinking about doing some xenograft studies by transplanting some lymphoma cells derived from human patients into mice. We'd like to visualize the cells in live animals by expressing a luciferase gene or GFP gene in the cells. Could anybody recommend a few papers that have some introduction and detailed description of this type of techniques? Thanks!

The best place to start with is Clipper website the company selling IVIS system at http://www.caliperls.com/products/optical-...-200-series.htm
http://www.caliperls.com/assets/015/7290.pdf

They also sell different luciferase expressing cell lines for in vivo study. http://www.caliperls.com/products/reagents...-animal-models/

You can find protocols here http://www.protocol-online.org/prot/Animal...ging/index.html

The invivoimagingcommunity.com site is a centralized forum and information resource for lab animal in vivo imaging. They cover in vivo molecular, bioluminescence, fluorescence, optical, SPECT, PET, CT, ultrasound and MRI.
The invivoimagingsolutions.com site provides reagents, products and instrumentation related to in vivo imaging. They have readymade luc2, GFP or custom lentiviruses to transfect cell lines and offer custom cell transfection.

TracyDuke on Wed Mar 10 22:12:06 2010 said:

Maybe you could check out these- 1 article and 2 reviews about bioluminescence imaging

A luciferase transgenic mouse model: visualization of prostate development and its androgen responsiveness in live animals (C-L Hsieh et al., 2005; Journal of Molecular Endocrinology)
Bioluminescence Imaging (Ruxana T. Sadikot and Timothy S. Blackwell, 2005; PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN THORACIC SOCIETY)
Bioluminescence imaging in living organisms (David K Welsh and Steve A Kay, 2005; Current Opinion in Biotechnology)