Experimental Animal Division

Autophagy (Greek for “self-eating”) is known to have important roles in various physiological and pathological processes such as maintenance of the amino acid pool during starvation, preimplantation development, prevention of neurodegeneration, anti-aging, tumor suppression, clearance of intracellular microbes, and regulation of innate and adaptive immunity [1,2]. Accordingly, there is a growing need among scientists to be able to detect autophagy in vivo. The GFP-LC3#53 transgenic mouse is one of the most widely used in vivo autophagy monitoring tools and was developed by Dr. Noboru Mizushima [3]. This transgenic mouse enables the accurate detection of autophagosome in diverse biological processes. We have extended its capability to other useful inbred strains such as BALB/cAnN (RBRC00641), C3H/HeNCrlj, and MSM/MsRbrc (RBRC00209) by successive backcrossing. The genetic backgrounds of these strains were examined using simple sequence length polymorphism markers to assess congenic status. A genotyping protocol was also established to distinguish homozygous and hemizygous transgenic mice. These autophagy monitoring mice will be useful for assessing autophagy in various mouse disease models.