The zinc finger protein of the cerebellum 5 (encoded by Zic5) is a neural crest cell transcription factor that initially marks the cells of neural crest fate early in development. Zic5 is expressed uniformly across the epiblast before gastrulation and becomes restricted to only neural folds and the dorsal-most neural tube during the neural tube closure. It is an early marker for the pre-migratory neural crest cells. These Zic5-CreER knock-in/knock-out (KI/KO) mice express an iCreERT2 fusion protein driven by the zinc finger protein of the cerebellum 5 (Zic5) endogenous promoter while abolishing endogenous Zic5 expression. Although the Zic5-CreER KIKO allele contains an AcGFP sequence, the donating investigator reports that expression of the GFP fusion protein is weak and cannot be visualized with antibody staining. The donating investigator reports homozygous mice are viable but have not been characterized fully. The long-term viability and fertility of the homozygous mice are unknown. Previous Zic5 null mice have been reported by other investigators to show neonatal lethality or increased premature death. Restricted to the cytoplasm, iCre-ERT2 can only gain access to the nuclear compartment after exposure to tamoxifen. When Zic5-CreER are bred with mice containing loxP-flanked sequences, tamoxifen-inducible Cre-mediated recombination will result in the deletion of the floxed sequences in the Cre-expressing cells of the offspring. For example, the donating laboratory confirmed Cre recombinase activity in all three germ layers when induced with tamoxifen at embryonic day 6.5 (E6.5) but later induction at E7.5 or later restricted the progeny to neural plate border derivatives in E9.5 embryo by crossing these mice to Rosa26loxp-stop-loxp-tdTomato (Ai9; Stock No. <a href="https://www.jax.org/strain/007909">007909</a>).

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Zic5-CreER knock-in/knock-out mice express an iCreERT2 fusion protein driven by the zinc finger protein of the cerebellum 5 (Zic5) endogenous promoter while abolishing endogenous Zic5 expression. When bred with mice containing a loxP-flanked sequence of interest, tamoxifen-inducible Cre-mediated recombination will result in the deletion of the floxed sequences in the Zic5-expressing cells of the offspring. These mice may be useful when studying the fate of pre-migratory neural crest cells.

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