Abstract
Cre-Lox recombination is known as a site-specific recombinase technology, and is widely used to carry out modification at specific sites in the DNA of cells. The system consists of an enzyme, Cre recombinase, that recombines a pair of short target sequences, the lox sites. The Cre-Lox system can be used to activate or repress a gene depending on the placement of the lox sites. Placing the Cre recombinase under the control of a cell-specific promoter allows expression only in specific cells or cellular subsets, thus providing a powerful tool for analysis of gene function at specific developmental or physiological niches. Nowadays almost every aspect of T cell biology can be approached by a specific Cre model. This powerful tool allows scientists to overcome the limitations of gene-deficient animals and target a gene of interest specifically in T cell or T cell subsets by appropriate placement of the lox sites. Here we describe the main Cre lines that enable gene targeting in T helper cells or CD4 T cell subsets, and the most common methods of assessing the recombination efficiency.
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References
Madisen L et al (2010) A robust and high-throughput Cre reporting and characterization system for the whole mouse brain. Nat Neurosci 13(1):133–40
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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Śledzińska, A., Fairbairn, L., Buch, T. (2014). Manipulation of T Cell Function and Conditional Gene Targeting in T Cells. In: Waisman, A., Becher, B. (eds) T-Helper Cells. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1193. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1212-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1212-4_15
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Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-1211-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-1212-4
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