Generation of brain tumours in mice by Cre-mediated recombination of neural progenitors in situ with the tamoxifen metabolite endoxifen.

Targeted cell- or region-specific gene recombination is widely used in the functional analysis of genes implicated in development and disease. In the brain, targeted gene recombination has become a mainstream approach to study neurodegeneration or tumorigenesis. The use of the Cre-loxP system to study tumorigenesis in the adult central nervous system (CNS) can be limited, when the promoter (such as GFAP) is also transiently expressed during development, which can result in the recombination of progenies of different lineages.