Inducible targeting of cDCs and their subsets in vivo

Conventional dendritic cells (cDCs) are essential immune cells linking the innate and adaptive immune system. cDC depletion in mice is an important method to study the function of these cells in vivo. Here we report an inducible in vivo system for cDC depletion in which excision of a loxP flanked Stop signal enables expression of the human diphtheria toxin receptor (DTR) under the control of Zbtb46 (zDClSlDTR). cDCs can be specifically depleted by combining zDClSlDTR mice with a Csf1rCre driver line. In addition, we show that zDCCre mice can be used to produce cDC specific conditional knockout mice (Irf8, Irf4, Notch2) which lack specific subsets of cDCs.