An overview of transgenic mouse production

Three basic techniques have emerged for making transgenic mice: two of these, retroviral infection of preimplantation embryos and the manipulation of embryonal stem cells, have attributes which make them desirable in some experiments, but the third technique, microinjection, is by far the most efficient and popular. All but one of the transgenic species described in the present volume are produced by microinjection. The isolation and manipulation of murine Embryonal Stem Cells (ES cells) and the production of chimeri mice are described in Chapters 23 and 24.