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09/08/2005

NEW - Quick & Easy Conditional Knockout Kits

Gene Bridges introduces two new Quick and Easy Conditional Knockout Kits to facilitate the cloning of targeting vectors necessary to generate knockout mice. The kits utilize the advantages of Gene Bridges´ proprietary Red/ET Recombineering system to enable the integration of either FRT or loxP sites at any position regardless of restriction sites within two weeks.

Conditional targeting constructs can be easily generated by repetitive insertion of the functional cassettes supplied with the kits or in combination with other cassettes also available from Gene Bridges, allowing the generation of mixed loxP and FRT constructs.

In combination with the Gene Bridges Subcloning Kit, the size of a targeting vector based on a high copy plasmid can be increased to 20kb.

Harald Kranz, Gene Bridges´ Head of Scientific Services said: "The generation of knockout mice through gene targeting by homologous recombination in embryonic stem cells is still an expensive and extremely time-consuming process. Our two new kits will speed up the construction of the necessary vector plasmids by weeks. Furthermore, the flexibility of the Red/ET system permits insertion of necessary loxP or FRT sites at any desired position and allows the design of the targeting vector to be optimized for downstream analyses in the mouse. So far, scientists had to make compromises in their vector design, since they were dependent on the presence of restriction sites in the corresponding sequence. Since the kits contain a step-by-step control reaction for all cloning steps, less experienced researchers will also be able to construct the desired targeting vectors quite easily".

In contrast to conventional cloning technologies Red/ET Recombineering works independently of restriction sites. Homologous arms as short as 50bp are sufficient for recombination to occur and can easily be introduced by PCR. The Red/ET Recombineering system is also ideally suited to modify large fragments of DNA, since there are practically no limits to the size of the DNA which can be modified.

For futher details go to our list of Red/ET kits