NOD scid gamma (NSG): official common name for the NOD.Cg-Prkdcscid Il2rgtm1Wjl/SzJ JAX® Mice strain

JAX® NOTES Issue 511, Fall 2008

005557
NOD.Cg-Prkdcscid Il2rgtm1Wjl/SzJ
(005557)

Many of our JAX® mice are not commonly referred to by their official strain names. Over time, they acquire common names, such as "NOD scid", "Black six" or "B6", "BALB", and "B6 Rag". Similarly, JAX® Mice strain NOD.Cg-Prkdcscid Il2rgtm1Wjl/SzJ (005557), a new immunodeficient strain that enables the investigation of many human biological processes in vivo, including infectious disease, immunology, and cancer, has acquired a variety of "nick names", but it has not had an official common name designated by The Jackson Laboratory.

That has now changed. As of August 1, 2008, we adopted the common name of "NOD scid gamma", abbreviated "NSG", for this strain. We hope that this will alleviate confusion with another immunodeficient mouse strain, "NOG", similar to NSG but patented by a Japanese vendor, CLEA. Unlike the NOG mouse, which has a truncated interleukin-2 receptor gamma chain (Ohbo et al. 1996), our NSG mouse carries the true null interleukin-2 receptor gamma chain mutation (Shultz et al. 2005).

We would like to encourage the research community to adopt NOD scid gamma, or NSG, as the official common name for this very important immunodeficient mouse strain.

References

(Authors in bold are Jackson Laboratory scientists)

Ohbo K, Suda T, Hashiyama M, Mantani A, Ikebe M, Miyakawa K, Moriyama M, Nakamura M, Katsuki M, Takahashi K, Yamamura K, Sugamura K. 1996. Modulation of hematopoiesis in mice with a truncated mutant of the interleukin-2 receptor gamma chain. Blood 87:956-67.

Shultz LD, Lyons BL, Burzenski LM, Gott B, Chen X, Chaleff S, Kotb M, Gillies SD, King M, Mangada J, Greiner DL, Handgretinger R. 2005. Human lymphoid and myeloid cell development in NOD/LtSz-scid IL2R gamma null mice engrafted with mobilized human hemopoietic stem cells. J Immunol 174:6477-89.