Generating Purkinje Cell-Specific Mitochondrial GFP Mice

We first generated the PCs-Mito-GFP mice, in which GFP could be expressed on the outer mitochondrial membrane specifically on the cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs). As shown in Figure 1A, Pcp2-ires-Cre mice express Cre recombinase under the control of the mouse Purkinje cell protein (Pcp2) and Cre recombinase expression is detected in Purkinje cells (PCs) of the cerebellar folia. MitoTag (Rosa26-CAG-LSL-GFP-OMM) is a Gt(ROSA)26S or knock-in allele that has a loxP-flanked STOP cassette preventing transcription of an outer mitochondrial membrane-targeted enhanced green fluorescent protein (GFP). When crossing the two mice lines, we could obtain the mice with robust GFP fluorescence localizing to mitochondria of PCs faithfully. Pcp2-Cre mice were hybridized with Mito-GFP mice to generate PCs-Mito-GFP mice (Zhang et al., 2004 (link)). The offspring mice with both Cre recombinase and Mito-GFP sequences were identified by PCR.