How to make recombinant inbred strains (RI)

C57BL/6J (B)

DBA/2J (D)

F1

20 generations brother-sister matings

BXD1

BXD2

BXD80
+ É +

F2

BXD RI
Strain set

fully
inbred

isogenic

hetero-
geneous

Recombined chromosomes are needed for mapping

female

male

chromosome pair

Inbred
Isogenic
siblings

BXD
The next few slides provide a short introduction to mapping the loci that are responsible for variation in a trait such as App expression level. These modulatory regions of the genome are sometimes called quantitative trait loci or QTLs. You may want to do some independent reading on this topic if this is your first exposure to QTL analysis.
The genetic reference population (GRP) of BXD recombinant inbred strains were originally generated about 25 years ago by Benjamin Taylor at The Jackson Laboratory. He crossed female C57BL/6J mice with male DBA/2J mice to generate the F1 and F2 progeny. At the bottom of this slide we have schematized one chromosome pair from three of the BXD RI strains.  The dashed vertical lines that lead to the final BXD RI lines involve 21 full sib matings (about 7 years of breeding). Some lines die out during inbreeding. For example, there is no longer any BXD3 strain.
Notes:
1. Over the last decade, our group (Lu Lu and Rob Williams) and Jeremy Peirce and Lee Silver at Princeton have enlarged Ben TaylorÕs set. There are now just over 80 BXD strains. They have all been genotyped using about 13,700 markers (SNPs and microsatellites). These markers are used to define the ÒblueÓ and ÒredÓ regions of the chromosomes as shown in the figure above.
2. Chromosomes of RI GRPs usually have about 4 times as many recombinations as those of F2 animals. However, unlike an F2, both chromosomes of an RI are identical. Therefore, 50 RI strains contain as many recombinations as 100 F2 animals.
3. BXD43 through BXD100 were generated using a special method that resulted in a further doubling of the average recombination density per chromosome. The entire set of 80 BXDs therefore contains as many recombinations as about 260 F2 animals.