Animal Disease Models And The Sperm-Mediated Gene Transfer Technique

21 century is a gene era. With the completion of sequencing the human genome, exploring the genomic function will become the heat topic in the research field of life science. And it undoubtedly will bring a huge change in the study about establishing the animal models of diseases.We now know, all the diseases have more or less, direct or indirect relationship with genes. We divide them into three major categories: single gene diseases, multiple genes diseases and acquired gene diseases. The primary principle of establishing animal disease model is etiology-based induction principle. Traditionally, the establishment of animal disease models is either spontaneous or inductive, which played a key role in the exploring research of human diseases during the non-gene era. Nowadays, with the accumulating understanding of genes in human and with the development of all kinds of the molecular biological techniques such as knock-out technique and transgenic technique, all these with no doubt will make a revolutionary impact in establishing animal models of diseases. And they, apparently, have already done. In a word, the combination of the modem and traditional techniques is the main trend to the future work of animal model establishment.To establish genetic susceptible animal disease model, we first need to be able to manipulate genes in vitro. And the deletion or addition of a gene into an animal largely depends on the techniques of gene transfer. Till now we have setup many comparatively mature techniques to introduce genes into the cells, like, microinjection technique, lipofectin technique, embryonic stem cell transgenic technique, retrovirus vector infection technique, electroporation technique, etc. All of them have their own advantages and disadvantages. Sperm-mediated gene transfer technique(SMGT) is set up at the end of 80s in the last century, and soon become a light point in the field of transgenic technique. Compared with the other transgenic methods, SMGT has a wider application species, the integration of the foreign gene into the sperm genome is site specific integration based on nonhomologous recombination, the requirement of designing the foreign DNA sequence is not very high., and the rate of producing transgenic animal is relatively high. Despite of all the preponderances described above, SMGT is still in his young age, many of the mechanisms remain obscure to us, we still have a long way to go in the future.In this thesis, we make some conclusion about the experiments we have done in the use of SMGT to produce transgenic animal, and give some detail descriptions about the factors that may affect the method, we do achieve some good results.As a new and promising technique in the field of gene transfer, sperm-mediated gene transfer is expected to be an indispensable technique in the establishment of animal disease model, in the research of the disease mechanism and in the study of the gene function inside the whole animals in the future.