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A wide range of transgenic animal models and mutation detection systems have been developed for mutagenicity testing of carcinogens in mammalian cells. Of these, transgenic Big Blue (referred to hereafter as BB) mice and the λ Select cII Mutation Detection System have been employed for mutagenicity experiments by this group and many other research groups worldwide1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. For the past 16 years, we have investigated the mutagenic effects of various chemical and/or physical agents using these transgenic animals or their corresponding embryonic fibroblast cell cultures treated with a test compound, and subsequently analyzed the phenotype and genotype of the cII transgene by the λ Select cII assay and DNA sequencing, respectively10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24. The genome of these transgenic animals contains a bacteriophage λ shuttle vector (λLIZ) integrated on chromosome 4 as a multi-copy head-to-tail concatemer1,2,25. The λLIZ shuttle vector carries two mutational reporter genes, namely the lacI and cII transgenes1,2,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47. The λ Select cII assay is based on the recovery of the λLIZ shuttle vectors from the genomic DNA of cells derived from organs/tissues of transgenic animals1,2,25. The recovered λLIZ shuttle vectors are then packaged into λ phage heads capable of infecting an indicator host Escherichia coli. Subsequently, the infected bacteria are grown under selective conditions to allow for scoring and analysis of mutations in the cII transgene1,3.
Here, we describe a detailed protocol for the λ Select cII assay, which consists of isolation of genomic DNA from cells/organs of transgenic animals treated in vitro/in vivo with a test compound, retrieval of the λLIZ shuttle vectors from the genomic DNA, packaging of the vectors into infectious λ phages, infection of the host E. coli with the bacteriophages, identification of the cII-mutants under selective conditions to determine the cII mutant frequency, and DNA sequence analysis to establish the cII mutation spectrum. The protocol can be applied to transgenic mouse/rat cell cultures treated in vitro with a chemical/physical agent of interest, or tissues/organs of the corresponding animals treated in vivo with the test chemical/agent1,2,4,48,49,50,51,52. A schematic presentation of the λ Select cII assay is shown in Figure 1.