Shi Jiayuan, Hua Li, Harmer Danielle, Li Peishan, Ren Guangwen
The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME, USA.
Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2018;1784:263-275. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-7837-3_24.
The Cre/loxP system is a widely applied technology for site-specific genetic manipulation in mice. This system allows for deletion of the genes of interest in specific cells, tissues, and whole organism to generate a diversity of conditional knockout mouse strains. Additionally, the Cre/loxP system is useful for development of cell- and tissue-specific reporter mice for lineage tracing, and cell-specific conditional depletion models in mice. Recently, the Cre/loxP technique was extensively adopted to characterize the monocyte/macrophage biology in mouse models. Compared to other relatively homogenous immune cell types such as neutrophils, mast cells, and basophils, monocytes/macrophages represent a highly heterogeneous population which lack specific markers or transcriptional factors. Though great efforts have been made toward establishing macrophage-specific Cre driver mice in the past decade, all of the current available strains are not perfect with regard to their depletion efficiency and targeting specificity for endogenous macrophages. Here we overview the commonly used Cre driver mouse strains targeting macrophages and discuss their major applications and limitations.
Cre/loxP系统是一种广泛应用于小鼠位点特异性基因操作的技术。该系统能够在特定细胞、组织和整个生物体中删除感兴趣的基因，以产生多种条件性敲除小鼠品系。此外，Cre/loxP系统对于开发用于谱系追踪的细胞和组织特异性报告基因小鼠以及小鼠细胞特异性条件性缺失模型也很有用。最近，Cre/loxP技术被广泛用于在小鼠模型中表征单核细胞/巨噬细胞生物学特性。与其他相对均质的免疫细胞类型（如中性粒细胞、肥大细胞和嗜碱性粒细胞）相比，单核细胞/巨噬细胞是一个高度异质性的群体，缺乏特异性标志物或转录因子。尽管在过去十年中人们为建立巨噬细胞特异性Cre驱动小鼠付出了巨大努力，但就其对内源性巨噬细胞的清除效率和靶向特异性而言，目前所有可用的品系都并不完美。在此，我们概述了常用的靶向巨噬细胞的Cre驱动小鼠品系，并讨论它们的主要应用和局限性。
