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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Mar 22.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Neurosci. 2008 May 4;11(6):721–728. doi: 10.1038/nn.2118

Figure 1. Strategy used for co-expression of YFP and cre in SLICK transgenic mice.

Figure 1

A. Schematic representation of the DNA construct used to generate SLICK transgenic mice. Two copies of the Thy1 promoter drive expression of YFP and the inducible form of cre recombinase–creERT2. CreERT2 consists of cre recombinase fused to a modified ligand binding domain from the estrogen receptor that can be activated by the synthetic ligand tamoxifen but not by endogenous estrogens16. Tamoxifen administration can thus be used to control the timing of recombination. B, C. Strategies to achieve conditional gene knockout and expression using the SLICK system. SLICK mice are first crossed to mice in which the expression of a gene of interest is control by cre-mediated recombination. For gene knockout, part or all of the coding sequence of a gene of interest is flanked by two short loxP sequences (“floxed”) and is excised upon cre activation by tamoxifen (B). For conditional transgene expression a transcriptional stop sequence (STOP cassette) is placed immediately upstream of the coding sequence of the transgene. Deletion of the stop cassette by activated cre initiates transgene expression (C). D, E. Double-fluorescent in situ hybridization for YFP (green) and cre recombinase (red) in the cortex of SLICK-A and hippocampus of SLICK-V transgenic mice respectively. Scale bar = 20μm.