Dopaminergic neurons play important roles in brain function and studying dopaminergic system has been a major field of neuroscience research. Genetically modified mice have greatly advanced research of dopaminergic neurons. However, it has been shown that dopaminergic neurons contain several subtypes expressing distinct genetic markers, and it is challenging to study genetically different subtypes of dopaminergic neurons using current mouse lines. Here, we report a newly developed Dat-ires-flp line, in which flippase gene is knocked in after the stop codon of Slc6a3 (dopamine transporter, DAT) gene. We validated this line to show that flp is specifically expressed in dopaminergic neurons, and by breeding with Cre-expressing line (i.e. Vglut2-cre) we can study a specific subpopulation of dopaminergic neurons. We expect this line will be widely used to study different subtypes of dopaminergic neurons in diverse contexts.

多巴胺能神经元在脑功能中起着重要作用，研究多巴胺能系统一直是神经科学研究的主要领域。转基因小鼠对多巴胺能神经元的研究非常先进。然而，已经显示出多巴胺能神经元包含表达不同遗传标记的几种亚型，并且使用当前的小鼠品系研究多巴胺能神经元的遗传上不同的亚型是具有挑战性的。在这里，我们报告了一个新开发的Dat-ires-flp品系，其中在Slc6a3（多巴胺转运蛋白，DAT）基因的终止密码子后敲入了flippase基因。我们验证了这条线以显示flp在多巴胺能神经元中特异性表达，并且通过用Cre表达系（即Vglut2-cre）进行繁殖，我们可以研究多巴胺能神经元的特定亚群。