Selected Grantee Publications

Endogenous Zebrafish Neural Cre Drivers Generated by CRISPR/Cas9 Short Homology Directed Targeted Integration

Almeida et al., Scientific Reports. 2021.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33462297/

Almeida et al. previously reported precision targeted integration of reporter DNA in zebrafish using CRISPR/Cas9. Here, they isolated zebrafish Cre recombinase drivers. A 2A-Cre recombinase transgene with 48 bp homology arms was targeted into proneural genes ascl1b, olig2 and neurod1. They observed high rates of germline transmission from 10 to 100% (10% olig2; 20% neurod1; 100% ascl1b). The lines Tg(ascl1b-2A-Cre)is75, Tg(olig2-2A-Cre)is76, and Tg(neurod1-2A-Cre)is77 expressed functional Cre recombinase in the cell populations. Results demonstrate Cre recombinase expression is driven by the native promoter and regulatory elements of targeted genes. This approach is a cost-effective method to generate cell type specific zebrafish Cre and CreERT2 drivers. Supported by ORIP (R24OD020166).