Adoptive Transfer of Autoimmune Diabetes Using Immunodeficient Nonobese Diabetic (NOD) Mice

Studying Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) in the nonobese diabetic (NOD) mouse model can be cumbersome as onset of disease does not usually occur naturally prior to the age of 12-14 weeks and is often restricted to female mice. Furthermore, the onset of disease occurs at random, which makes studying T1D in statistically meaningful cohorts of NOD mice a challenge. Transfer models of T1D into immunodeficient mice, such as NOD SCID mice, allows the study of potential therapeutic interventions in larger cohorts of animals, over shorter periods of time. In this chapter we discuss the adoptive transfer of diabetes into immunodeficient mice on the NOD genetic background that are generally available to the research community.