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Tissues used to genotyping animals - What tissues do you take for genotyping? (Jun/10/2011 )

Hi all!

What tissues does everyone here take for genotyping? For mice I've read the common one is either tail or toe snip. I'm about to do some behavioral work and am hesitant to essentially mutilate my mice.

Moreover, has anyone had success with using stool samples for genotyping purposes? There is an interesting paper on it, but I am unsure of how successful it would be for me: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10580111

-Xanthier-

You can also use urine samples (at least you know exactly from which mouse the sample is, particularly when you have more than one mouse per cage). You'll need to "squeeze" the mouse a bit, don't know how much that affects your experiment...

-Rsm-

We take tail snips from 10-12 day old mouse pups.

Basically you use a scalpel (and a glass bead sterilizer) and gently take one pup out of the nest at a time, cut off 1mm of tail tip, and then cut that piece in half again, thus getting two samples to test. The hot scalpel cauterizes the tail so it hopefully won't bleed...then we toe-tattoo each pup for identification. We have found that sampling from the rather young pups (eyes not quite even open yet) minimizes stress.

-Fungus_Dreams-

Stool works well for genotyping transgenic mice. Here is a new article in Lab Anim (NY). 2012 Mar 20;41(4):102-7, Non-invasive genotyping of transgenic animals using fecal DNA. You'll get a few clean droppings by moving a mouse out of its cage. The DNA is extracted from a fecal dropping with 150 ul of AquaStool solution, costing about $1/extraction. The animals certainly appreciate not being amputated :D

-AquaPlasmid-