[Nuclear reprogramming of somatic nuclear transfer embryos].

Although the cloned animals have been successfully generated in a number of mammalian species, there are still many problems about this technology. The developmental aberrancies include a high rate of abortion during early gestation and high rate of perinatal death. The main cause of these problems may be attributed to the epigenetic reprogramming of somatic donor genome. During mammalian embryonic development, DNA methylation is an essential process in the regulation of transcription. There are many aberrant methylation in various genomic regions of cloned embryos. The gene imprinting of cloned embryos are also abnormal.

[The ht-PAm cDNA knock-in the goat beta-casein gene locus].

The production of recombinant protein is one of the major successes of biotechnology, animal cells are required to synthesize proteins with the appropriate post-translational modifications. Transgenic animal mammary gland bioreactor are being used for this purpose. Gene targeting is a more powerful method to produce mammary gland bioreactor, and nuclear transfer from cultured somatic cells provides an wonderful means of cell-mediated transgensis. Here we describe efficient and reproducible gene targeting in goat fetal fibroblasts to place the human tissue plasminogen activator mutant (ht-PAm) cDNA at the beta-casein locus, and would produce the transgenic goat by nuclear transfer. To construct the gene targeting vector pGBC4tPA, the milk goat beta-casein genomic DNA sequence for homologous arms had been cloned firstly. The left arm was 6.3 kb fragment including goat beta-casein gene 5' flanking sequence, and the right arm was 2.4 kb fragement including beta-casein gene from exon 8 to exon 9. The ht-PAm cDNA was subcloned in the goat beta-casein gene exon 2, and the endogenous start condon was replaced by that of ht-PAm. The bacterial neomycin (neo) gene as positive selection marker gene, was placed in the beta-casein gene intron 7, the thymidine kinase (tk) as the negative selection marker gene, was just outside the right arm. The validity of the positive-negative selection vector (PNS), was tested, and targeting homologous recombination (HR) were elevated to 5-fold with the negative selection marker using the drug GANC. The DNA fragment in which two LoxP sequence was delected effectively using Cre recombinase in vitro. Goat fetal fibroblasts were thawed and cultured to subconfluence before transfection, about 10(7) fibroblasts were electoporated at 240V, 600 microF in 0.8 mL PBS buffer containing linear pGBC4tPA. transfected cells were cultured in collagen-coated 96-wellplate for 24h without selection, then added the drug G418 (600 microg/mL) and GANC (2 micromol/L). After 12 days of selection, well separated G418r/GANCr clones were isolated and expanded in 24-wellplate. 244 clones were selected, and only 90 clones could grow and be tested by PCR screening for targeting. The primary result demonstrated that 31 targeting cell clones with homologous recombination events were obtained, and 2 cell clones was verified by DNA sequence analysis on the homologous recombination region.

[Production of mammary gland bioreactor by gene targeting of somatic cells].

Producing mammary gland bioreactor showed great advantage over many years, but the level of transgenic expression was low in transgenic animals and the diversity was more great because of the position effect of transgene and the artificial recombination of the gene elements. Gene targeting based on the principle of gene homologous recombination had been studied and applied, because the transgene could be integrated precisely in the chromosome. This review summary the current status of producing mammary gland bioreactor by the technology of gene targeting and nuclear transfer using the somatic cell lines. These aspects were discussed, including the characteristic and difficulties of gene targeting, the strategies to improve the efficiency of gene targeting, the different features of between the strategy of promoter-trap and the Cre-LoxP system, etc; for the others, how to select the cell lines with the different strategies of gene targeting, how to raise the times of cell lines that was cultured after the gene targeting. Somatic cell nuclear transfer offers new and exciting opportunities in the areas of the gene targeting. However, the field as a whole is still difficult and complex. In this paper, we described recent advances and novel approaches, which resulted in progress during the last year. Key problems hindering further progress are addressed, for example, how to increase the efficiency of nuclear transfer. With the technology of gene targeting and nuclear transfer, it should provide a general way to produce specific genetic changes in several mammalian species. We are clearly at the dawn of a new era in mammalian genetic technology.