Although T-cell receptor (TCR) transgenic as well as knockout and knockin mice have had a large impact on our understanding of T-cell development, signal transduction and function, the need to cross these mice delays experiments considerably. Here we provide a methodology for the rapid expression of TCRs in mice using 2A peptide–linked multicistronic retroviral vectors to transduce stem cells of any background before adoptive transfer into RAG-1^−/− mice. For simplicity, we refer to these as retrogenic mice. We demonstrate that these retrogenic mice are comparable to transgenic mice expressing three commonly used TCRs (OT-I, OT-II and AND). We also show that retrogenic mice expressing male antigen–specific TCRs (HY, MataHari and Marilyn) facilitated the analysis of positive and negative selection in female and male mice, respectively. We examined various tolerance mechanisms in epitope-coupled TCR retrogenic mice. This powerful resource could expedite the identification of proteins involved in T-cell development and function.

* Note: In the version of this article initially published, the name of one of the receptors mentioned in the abstract was incorrectly stated as OY-II instead of OT-II. The correct sentence is: “We demonstrate that these retrogenic mice are comparable to transgenic mice expressing three commonly used TCRs (OT-I, OT-II, and AND). “ This error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.