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Vagaries of conditional gene targeting

Nature Immunology volume 8, pages 665–668 (2007)Cite this article

Conditional gene targeting based on excision or inversion of loxP-flanked DNA segments by Cre recombinase is a powerful technology for the analysis of gene function, but unexpected expression patterns of cre transgenes, variability of recombination efficiency depending on the target gene and potential toxicity of Cre recombinase represent serious challenges for the experimenter.

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Figure 1: Recombination of a loxP-flanked Yy1 allele effected by the CD21-Cre3A bacterial artificial chromosome transgene in CD21-Cre3A-transgenic mice heterozygous for the loxP-flanked Yy1 allele.
Figure 2: Induction of Cre-mediated recombination from the Cre-ERT2 transgene29 leads to death of c-Myc-driven primary B cell lymphomas.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Liu, Y. Shi, E. Derudder, S. Raffel and S. Casola for allowing us to show unpublished data; S. Casola and other members of the laboratory for discussions of these matters over the years; and S. Casola, C. Wilson and F.T. Wunderlich for comments on this paper. Supported by the National Institutes of Health (K.R.) and the European Union (K.R.).

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  1. Marc Schmidt-Supprian and Klaus Rajewsky are in the Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School and the CBR Institute for Biomedical Research, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. supprian@cbr.med.harvard.edu or rajewsky@cbr.med.harvard.edu,

    Marc Schmidt-Supprian & Klaus Rajewsky

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Schmidt-Supprian, M., Rajewsky, K. Vagaries of conditional gene targeting. Nat Immunol 8, 665–668 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/ni0707-665

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