Abstract
Major advances have been made in the use of the Cre/loxP system for conditional gene targeting in the mouse. By combining the ability of Cre recombinase to invert or excise a DNA fragment, depending upon the orientation of the flanking loxP sites, and the use of wild-type loxP and variant lox511 sites, we devised an efficient and reliable Cre-mediated genetic switch, called FLEX, through which expression of a given gene can be turned off, while expression of another one can be simultaneously turned on. We discuss how this innovative, flexible and powerful approach, which virtually adapts to any kind of site-specific recombinase (e.g., Cre and Flp recombinases), can be used to easily generate, even at high throughput and genome wide scale, many genetic modifications in a conditional manner, including those which were considered as difficult or impossible to achieve.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Professor Pierre Chambon (IGBMC) and Professor Harald von Melchner (University of Frankfurt) for their constant support, as well as for invaluable advices. We also thank Professor Manuel Mark for critical reading of the manuscript. This work was supported by funds from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm), and Université Louis Pasteur (ULP), Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), and the Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft (DFG) to the German Gene Trap Consortium.
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Schnütgen, F., Ghyselinck, N.B. Adopting the good reFLEXes when generating conditional alterations in the mouse genome. Transgenic Res 16, 405–413 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-007-9089-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-007-9089-8