Genetically modified organisms present the challenge of quantifying structures and functions in organs, tissues and cells.
Morphological investigation is greatly facilitated by taking sections in MRI, CAT scanning, histological preparations or EM,
and powerful unbiased quantitative tools called stereology can use these sections in a sampling based approach to measure
volume, number surface and length. Stereological tools have become methods of choice in the fields of neurobiology, nephrology
and cell biology and allow accurate unbiased description of intact organs, tissues, cells and organelles. Stereology has yet
to be applied widely in the field of transgenics. Here I provide an overview of stereological methods and explain how they
represent a powerful addition to the transgenic biologists armoury of techniques.
Keywords Stereology - Unbiased quantification - Morphology - Functional genomics - Phenotyping - Transgenic - Mouse knockout - Mouse knockin