Determination of the Selection Capacity of Antibiotics for Gene Selection.

Choosing a potent selection antibiotic (SA), is a crucial success factor when creating stably transfected cell lines using an antibiotic selection marker. The selection capacity of this antibiotic is defined as its ability to kill sensitive, untransfected parental cells, while leaving resistant, transfected cells unharmed. Currently, no procedure has been described to determine this selection capacity.

Cytoarchitectural and metabolic adaptations in muscles with mitochondrial and cytosolic creatine kinase deficiencies.

We have blocked creatine kinase (CK) mediated phosphocreatine (PCr) <==> ATP transphosphorylation in mitochondria and cytosol of skeletal muscle by knocking out the genes for the mitochondrial (ScCKmit) and the cytosolic (M-CK) CK isoforms in mice. Animals which carry single or double mutations, if kept and tested under standard laboratory conditions, have surprisingly mild changes in muscle physiology. Strenuous ex vivo conditions were necessary to reveal that MM-CK absence in single and double mutants leads to a partial loss of tetanic force output.