ABSTRACT
Curly-whiskers arose spontaneously in a subline of CBA/Cbi mice at the Chester Beatty Research Institute in London. An affected male and female were found in a litter of mice. Curly-whiskers is considered to be a recessive mutation that maps to mouse Chromosome 9. A second mutation occurred in the SJL/J strain. This mutation was initially designated tail hair depletion but was subsequently found to be allelic to curly-whiskers and the gene symbol changed to tail hair depletion. Heterozygous mice have slightly curled vibrissae, but this feature is not easily distinguishable from wild-type controls. The curly-whiskers mutation has been used to a limited degree as a linkage-testing stock. It is more commonly used to study the pathogenesis of B-cell lymphomas due to ecotropic retroviruses. The curly-whiskers mutation is maintained as the inbred strain CWD/Le at the Jackson Laboratory Genetic Resource. DNA extracts are available from the Mouse DNA Resource at the Jackson Laboratory.
