Recombinant Inbred Strains

Abstract

The flurry of interest in the literature in the use of recombinant inbred strains for the analysis of behavioral inheritance appears to stem from the work of Bailey (1971) at the Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor, Maine. In this influential paper he was, however, concerned not with behavioral phenotypes but rather with histocompatibility as evidenced by skin graft rejection and, to a minor extent, with coat color. Recombinant inbred or RI strains are created by the technique of repeated inbreeding over successive generations, in order to fix genetically the variation resulting from recombination. It is a familiar technique in genetics and has also been used in psychogenetics (van Abeelen, 1970). Recombination is essentially the process, seen, for example, in segregation in an F₂ population derived from a cross of inbred strains, which results in progeny that differ from their parents in their individual combination of genes. It is also the mechanism by which the genes of the progeny of a randomly breeding population come to be different from those of their parents.