g., under either Pdgfra or NG2 control in the present context of NG2-glia. Another technical issue relates to the kinetics of selleck inhibitor Cre recombination—this depends on the structure of the reporter transgene (e.g., distance between lox sites) as well as the level and duration of Cre expression. Often, a larger proportion of the target cell population can be labeled using a “good recombiner” like Rosa26-YFP

( Srinivas et al., 2001) compared to a “poor recombiner” like Rosa26-eGFP ( Mao et al., 2001). The commonly used Z/EG ( Novak et al., 2000) and Rosa26-LacZ ( Soriano, 1999) lie somewhere between these. There seems to be a threshold of Cre expression, below which very little recombination of the reporter gene occurs; this threshold is lower for a good recombiner than a poor recombiner. This effect can introduce additional cell-type selectivity; Selleckchem I-BET-762 for example, if a given mouse line expresses Cre in two types of cell, but more highly in one than the other, then reporter gene activation can effectively be restricted to the more highly-expressing cells. This can be useful in some circumstances; for example, it is probably the reason that Olig2-CreER∗ drives recombination and reporter gene activation mainly in NG2-glia and not in differentiated oligodendrocytes ( Dimou et al., 2008). However, in other situations it might introduce unwanted bias, e.g., by subdividing the NG2-glia population

in some unpredictable way. In short, Cre-lox fate mapping studies need to be interpreted with care and an open mind, each study considered on its own merits. It is worth noting here that differences in the Cytidine deaminase tamoxifen induction protocol—whether tamoxifen or 4HT is used, whether it is administered by injection or gavage, or whether it is administered once or several times, for example—can also affect the efficiency of recombination independently of the reporter mouse line employed. While this will result

in a greater or lesser fraction of NG2-glia becoming labeled, it will have no effect on the level of expression of the reporter in individual cells because that is determined purely by regulatory elements in the reporter transgene itself. The flip side of this is that the reporter transgene (e.g., Rosa26-based) is not necessarily expressed to the same high level in all cell types, which in principle could lead to under-estimation of certain cell types among the labeled progeny of NG2-glia, although there is no evidence that this has been a problem in the studies reviewed below. Initially, constitutively active Cre was used in NG2-Cre BAC transgenic mice to label the progeny of NG2 glia during brain and spinal cord development ( Zhu et al., 2008a and Zhu et al., 2008b). As expected, a large proportion of myelinating oligodendrocytes was found among the GFP-labeled progeny of perinatal NG2-glia.