Targeted insertion of exogenous DNA into the eukaryotic genome by the Cre recombinase.

Cre is a 38-kD protein from bacteriophage P1 that catalyzes site-specific recombination between 34-bp loxP sequences. Our previous work has shown that Cre can perform site-specific excisive recombination not only in prokaryotes, but also in eukaryotes such as yeast and cultured mammalian cells. In this work we show that intermolecular Cre-mediated recombination can specifically direct the integration of a loxP-containing circular DNA into a chromosomal loxP site, both in yeast and in mammalian cells. The resulting integrants are predominantly simple single-copy insertions. Cre-mediated recombination thus provides a simple way to direct single-copy site-specific integration of exogenous DNA into the eukaryotic genome.