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Beyond knockouts: cre resources for conditional mutagenesis

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An Erratum to this article was published on 05 October 2012

Abstract

With the effort of the International Phenotyping Consortium to produce thousands of strains with conditional potential gathering steam, there is growing recognition that it must be supported by a rich toolbox of cre driver strains. The approaches to build cre strains have evolved in both sophistication and reliability, replacing first-generation strains with tools that can target individual cell populations with incredible precision and specificity. The modest set of cre drivers generated by individual labs over the past 15+ years is now growing rapidly, thanks to a number of large-scale projects to produce new cre strains for the community. The power of this growing resource, however, depends upon the proper deep characterization of strain function, as even the best designed strain can display a variety of undesirable features that must be considered in experimental design. This must be coupled with the parallel development of informatics tools to provide functional data to the user and facilitated access to the strains through public repositories. We discuss the current progress on all of these fronts and the challenges that remain to ensure the scientific community can capitalize on the tremendous number of mouse resources at their disposal.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Laura Kus, Hongkui Zeng, Marie-Christine Burling, and Lauryl Nutter for information about individual cre driver programs. Special thanks to Caleb Heffner for his help with details and references for the JAX cre characterization program. This work was supported by NIH Grants HG000330 (JTE), HD062499 (JTE), RR032656 (JTE and SAM), DE020052 (SAM), RR026117 (SAM), and EU Grant HEALTH-F4-2009-223487 (JTE, DS, and NR).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Jackson Laboratory, 600 Main Street, Bar Harbor, ME, 04609, USA

    Stephen A. Murray & Janan T. Eppig

  2. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK

    Damian Smedley

  3. Departments of Medical Genetics and Psychiatry, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the Child & Family Research Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 4H4, Canada

    Elizabeth M. Simpson

  4. National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London, W12 0NN, UK

    Nadia Rosenthal

  5. EMBL Australia, Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Nadia Rosenthal

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  1. Stephen A. Murray
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Correspondence to Stephen A. Murray.

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Murray, S.A., Eppig, J.T., Smedley, D. et al. Beyond knockouts: cre resources for conditional mutagenesis. Mamm Genome 23, 587–599 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00335-012-9430-2

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