Genetic dissection of liver fibrogenesis: Association mapping and pair scans in BXD recombinant inbred (RI) mouse lines

Previously we identified multiple quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that determine susceptibility to liver fibrosis by linkage analysis in two experimental crosses of inbred mice (Hillebrandt et al. 2002, 2005). To overcome the limitation that such experimental crosses can be studied only once, our aim was to establish an everlasting genetic reference population that allows the integrated analysis of liver fibrosis. We availed of BXD-RI mouse lines, which have been generated by inbreeding F2 progeny from C57BL/6 and DBA/2 mouse strains. These lines show a unique mosaic gene set of their two founder strains and have…