Generation of Frizzled10-Cre transgenic mouse line: a useful tool for the study of dorsal telencephalic development

Wnt signaling plays an important role in regulating cortical and hippocampal development, but many of the other molecular mechanisms underlying dorsal telencephalic development are largely unknown. We are taking advantage of the highly regionalized expression patterns of signaling components of the Wnt pathway to generate new mouse lines that will be useful for studying forebrain development. Here, we describe a transgenic mouse line where Cre is driven by the promoter of the Wnt receptor, Frizzled10. In these mice, Cre activity is mainly detected in the dorsal telencephalon during development and is confined to the pyramidal cell fields in the adult hippocampus. The Cre recombinase has very high efficiency when assayed by crossing the transgenic line with the ROSA26 reporter line. Thus, this Cre line will be useful for the study of dorsal telencephalic development and conditional inactivation of target genes in the cortex and hippocampus.