transgenic mice work for phd thesis?

[chef]

what r your opinions on working in a hardcore mouse model lab for your phd? r transgenic mice a 'no-no' for a phd b/c more often than not u spend tons of time & effort but end up with zero pubs if there is no phenotype? yes science projects are always risky & obviously mouse model is a very powerful tool but i wonder if micework should be postponed for later on - postdoc or PI. any idea/comments welcome

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[Newquagmire]

as i'm sure you know, mice take a long time to grow, even after all the effort you've put into making them.

is there any way you might be able to do complimentary work in other models to speed the process along?

i'm working in a fairly well known mouse lab right now, and i can tell you that there are some rather disgruntled phd students.

 

[Andrew_Doan]

Transgenics are high risk, high reward.

As stated above, they require an enormous amount of resources and time. If there is a phenotype then you're golden and publish; however, if the transgenics or knockouts are fine, then you're going to struggle to find something interesting to write about. Don't let the transgenics be your only project. I highly recommend that it supplements your graduate PhD work rather than being the main focus. For instance, I worked for a lab that produced transgenic and knockout mice. A graduate student made both transgenic and knockout animals of the Alzheimer's gene APP and APLP. No obvious phenotype! That project took about 3 years, and there were several people working on the project together. High risk, high reward. In this case, it didn't work out well, but the student also did her thesis during a time when transgenics and knockouts were a novelty. Thus, she was able to write a dissertation about the negative findings.

Good luck Chef!

 

[Treg]

I would say work with an established, characterized line; do NOT set one up yourself.

I took a risky transgenic mouse project for my thesis, since I had three publications from my undergrad work and didn't feel the immediate need to publish. I spent three years trying to make the mice, screening, western blotting, recloning a new construct, waiting for offspring, etc. In all I screened over 600 mice by PCR and/or southern, plus I had a tissue specific transgene that required sac'ing the animal to see if protein was present. In the end, I tried 4 different constructs with 7 sets total of microinjection, and 0/600+ had expression.

Lucky for me I have had an alternative pathway using transplantation to test the effect of my transgene is a slightly different setting. I have also had failures here, but lucky for me I have had a lot of success lately, and all of my pubs will come from the last 1.5 years of my grad work.

Keep in mind that my committee said that I had enough data for a thesis as of last summer, but my department requires 3 first authored papers to get the PhD. Thankfully, I have two that are ready to be submitted, and a third set of experiments based on these data are underway and should produce another paper for me.

If you have any specific q's about working with Tg mice, give me a PM.

Treg