The CXB set is the first, oldest, and smallest group of mouse recombinant inbred (RI) strains with the first publication by Donald Bailey in 1971 (Recombinant-inbred strains. An aid to finding identity, linkage, and function of histocompatibility and other genes. Transplantation 11:325-328). By 1975 the first set of 8 CXB strains were all beyond generation F30. The maternal strain is BALB/cBy and the paternal strain is C57BL/6By. Donald Bailey, the inventor of recombinant inbred strains, created the initial eight BXH recombinant inbred strains at The Jackson Laboratory in the mid-1960s. They were then called CXB-A through CXB-H. They have been used extensively by immunologists and neurogeneticists. A total of 13 of these strains are now available.
Approximately 506 traits are now included in the CXB 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 1384 markers that are informative in this mapping panel (Aug 2005).
There are a total of 694 known recombinations in the 13 CXB strains; an average of 53.4 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.