ANIMAL CORE

The goals of the Animal Core are to provide well characterizedanimals, to maintain, inoculate, monitor, and analyze the animals required for the scientific projects of this Program Project,and to establish new transgenic lines for future in-depth study of prion diseases. These goals will be accomplished as specifiedin the following four Aims through design, generation/acquisition, characterization, maintenance, breeding, inoculation, monitoring, and preliminary analysis (after inoculation) of all the animals. The function of the Animal Core will be achieved through four specific aims. Aim 1: Provide professional husbandry and reliable and consistent care to all the animals. It is critical that the animals receive reliable care since a large number of animals and extensive cross-breeding are required and animals in the ABSL3 facility often need to be maintained for long periods of time after inoculation. Aim 2: Design, generate/acquire, characterize, and maintain unique transgenic mouse lines to meet the needs of the entire Program Project. Develop new transgenic mouse lines for this project and future in-depth study of prion diseases. Many transgenic mice have been developed previously, and some will be created or acquired. All transgenic mice will be fully characterized before release to the investigators. Aim 3: Inoculate animals (mice or hamsters) with a variety of inoculum, monitor and record health status and symptoms, and dissect animals to obtain tissues/fluids for analysis. A database will be created and maintained to store all the information for each animal in the prion ABSL3 facility. Aim 4: Conduct Western blot analysis of tissues/fluids from the inoculated animals to assess the status of infection and to provide characterized tissues for the investigators;work closely with the Tissue Core to fully characterize all the animals before and after inoculation with prion materials. Many of the transgenic animals produced in this Core are unique and will be valuable resources to the entire prion research and surveillance community.