Genetic background determination
The Genome Scanning Service of The Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, ME) was used to determine the contributions of C57Bl/6 and 129/Sv strains in the interbred mice. Pieces of mouse tail were sent to The Jackson Laboratory for simple sequence length polymorphism (SSLP) PCR analysis with the DMit primers specific for B6 and 129 strain alleles . The SSLP panel consists of 108 mapped markers designed to distinguish between B6 and 129 strains. The markers are spaced 12–13 cM apart and span the nineteen autosomes.