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Concept
Inbred strain
Summary
Inbred strains (also called inbred lines, or rarely for animals linear animals) are individuals of a particular species which are nearly identical to each other in genotype due to long inbreeding. A strain is inbred when it has undergone at least 20 generations of brother x sister or offspring x parent mating, at which point at least 98.6% of the loci in an individual of the strain will be homozygous, and each individual can be treated effectively as clones. Some inbred strains have been bred for over 150 generations, leaving individuals in the population to be isogenic in nature. Inbred strains of animals are frequently used in laboratories for experiments where for the reproducibility of conclusions all the test animals should be as similar as possible. However, for some experiments, genetic diversity in the test population may be desired. Thus outbred strains of most laboratory animals are also available, where an outbred strain is a strain of an organism that is effectively wildtype in nature, where there is as little inbreeding as possible.
Certain plants including the genetic model organism Arabidopsis thaliana naturally self-pollinate, which makes it quite easy to create inbred strains in the laboratory (other plants, including important genetic models such as maize require transfer of pollen from one flower to another).
Inbred strains have been extensively used in research. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work that probably could not have been done without inbred strains. This work includes Medawar's research on immune tolerance, Kohler and Milstein's development of monoclonal antibodies, and Doherty and Zinkernagel's studies of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC).
Isogenic organisms have identical, or near identical genotypes. which is true of inbred strains, since they normally have at least 98.6% similarity by generation 20. This exceedingly high uniformity means that fewer individuals are required to produce results with the same level of statistical significance when an inbred line is used in comparison to an outbred line in the same experiment.
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