Abstract
CXC chemokine ligand 14 (CXCL14) was first reported to be expressed in breast and kidney and thus called BRAK, but later found to be expressed various organs and tissues in vivo and cell cultures in vitro. For the first step to find tissue- and cell-type specific functions of CXCL14, we produced conditional knockout mice by Cre/lox P system and embryonic stem cells of the C57BL/6 mouse strain. By mating BMAC/cxcl14+/flox with phosphoglycerokinase promoter-Cre mice followed by deletion of the Cre gene to avoid cleavage of putative cryptic/pseudo loxP site in the genome, we obtained systemic deletion of BMAC/cxcl14 gene. Intercrossing between male and female heterozygous mice (+/-) was performed; only 2.4% of the offspring were homozygous knockout mice, which was significantly lower than the expected Mendelian frequency, 25% (p<0.01). By inter-crossing cxcl14+/flox mice with various tissue- or cell-type specific Cre mice, the cxcl14 loxP mouse will be useful for clarify tissue- or cell-type specific functions of cxcl14 in vivo.
