Stargazer: a new neurological mutant on chromosome 15 in the mouse with prolonged cortical seizures.

We report here the initial description of the inheritance pattern, linkage mapping, and electroclinical phenotype of a recessive mutation on mouse Chromosome 15, stargazer (stg), that produces epilepsy. The salient epileptic phenotype is a syndrome of spontaneous, prolonged, generalized spike-wave cortical discharges with behavioral arrest. A second, complex, seizure pattern featuring movements during the discharge can also appear. The stg/stg mutant phenotype confirms the general principal that inherited epilepsies sharing similar cortical excitability patterns can be transmitted by single gene loci residing on different chromosomes and provides new evidence that the severity of seizure expression depends on the specific mutant gene affected.