The BXH set of recombinant inbred strains (RI) were made by crossing female C57BL/6J (B) with male C3H/HeJ (H) mice. Benjamin Taylor created the initial 12 BXH recombinant inbred strains at The Jackson Laboratory in 1969. A second set of eight BXH strains were generated by Linda Siracusa at the Kimmel Cancer Center (Kcc) in 1995. She selected for tyrosinase-negative albinos; a gene on the central part of chromosome (Chr) 7. Four of these new BXH strains (one now relabeled as a recombinant congenic) are now also available from The Jackson Laboratory. The following are the old and new symbols for the four recent additions:
- BXHA1/Sr = BXH20/Kcc
- BXHA2/Sr = BXH21/Kcc
- BXHB2/Sr = BXH22/Kcc
- BXHE1/Sr = B6cC3-1/Kcc (backcrossed to B6 and a recombinant congenic)
Approximately 142 traits are currently included in the BXH Phenotype database (July 2005).
All strains have been genotyped using the Wellcome-CTC-Illumina set of SNPs (13377), as well as some microsatellites, and other markers. WebQTL exploits a total of 8311 markers that are infomative in this mapping panel (Aug 2005).
There are a total of 775 known recombinations in the 16 core BXH strains; an average of 48.4 recombinations per strain (Shifman et al., 2006).
How to obtain these strains: Please see http://jaxmice.jax.org/jaxmicedb/html/rcbinbred.shtml.
For more details on the history, generation, and use of RI strains as genetic reference populations for systems genetics please see Silver (1995). Additional useful literature links are provided in the References link at the top center of this page.
BXH2 is susceptible to M. bovis (tuberculosis) and malaria infections despite Nramp1 resistance due to an Icsbp1 (Irf8) mutation. (P Gros and colleagues).