MI Line Search

To enhance the versatility of insertion alleles, we engineered a new mutator, MiMIC (Minos Mediated Integration Cassette), that incorporates two inverted ΦC31 attP target sites flanking a gene trap cassette. Recombination Mediated Cassette Exchange (RMCE) can be used to rapidly and efficiently replace the gene trap cassette with any other cassette flanked by attB sites. About 30% of insertions are in introns and therefore ideal for protein trapping. MIMIC is a very powerful tool for manipulating endogenous loci in Drosophila at will. Our goal is to recover intronic MIMIC insertions in thousands of loci, to facilitate localization studies of unknown proteins using confocal and electron microscopy, ChIP-Seq for transcription factors and chromatin proteins, protein purification for mass spectroscopy analysis, and numerous other applications.

Reference: Venken et al. (2011) Nature Methods 8:737-743 [PDF] [Suppl].