Fig. 2.

Epiblast-specific KO of PC5/6 at E18.5. (A) Intercrossing of flox/flox mice with Δ1/+ mice harboring a heterozygote knockin of Cre at the Meox2 locus generates ≈25% of Δ1/flox and Cre positive embryos. All of the embryos that have a shortened or no tail were characterized by the only presence of Δ1 alleles at the PC5/6 locus and were Cre positive (cKO). Most of them exhibited abdominal herniations (red arrows). (B) In the smallest mutant embryos, subcutaneous hemorrhages were observed (white arrow). (C) In situ hybridization analysis of PC5/6 mRNA in cryosections of embryos at E18.5 using an antisense cRNA probe revealed a drastic diminution of the signal in cKO embryos, similar to the background obtained with a control sense probe (data not shown).