Retrofitting vectors for Escherichia coli-based artificial chromosomes (PACs and BACs) with markers for transfection studies.

P1-based artificial chromosomes (PACs) and bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) have significantly expanded the size of fragments from eukaryotic genomes that can be stably cloned in Escherichia coli as plasmid molecules. Functional characterization of a gene within a given PAC or BAC clone often requires transferring the DNA into eukaryotic cells for transient or long-term expression. To facilitate transfection studies, we have developed...