A number of recent articles have reported the successful generation of transgenic mouse lines carrying large fragments of DNA contained in yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs) (1-5). The ability to transfer such large segments of DNA provides a number of opportunities, including the analysis ofthe function of large genes or gene clusters in their natural DNA configuration, the study of the influ...

Murine natural killer (NK) cells have been shown to inhibit the growth of the yeastlike organism Cryptococcus neoformans both in vivo and in vitro. An essential first step in NK cell-mediated damage of cryptococcal cells is the binding of the NK cell to the cryptococcal cell. The studies presented here focused on the binding event. Electron photomicrographs and three-dimensional reconstructions...

of loss of function of paternal and maternal allele-specific genes, respectively (Dittrich et al., 1996). Many imprinted genes here, including SNRPN, are unmethylated on the paternal chromosome but methylated on the maternal chromosome. Mutations within the SNRPN exon 1 region cause PWS, and those that occur further upstream and affect certain RNA (BD) transcripts cause AS. The imprinting cente...

A method for linking any standard yeast artificial chromosomes (YAC) is described. YACs are introduced into the same cell and joined by mitotic recombination between the vector arms and the homologous sequence in a linking vector; several YACs can be recombined sequentially. The linking vectors also contain the beta-galactosidase gene as an expression reporter in mammalian cells.