Generation of conditional knockout alleles for PRL-3

Phosphatase of regenerating liver-3 (PRL-3) is a member of the protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTP) superfamily and is highly expressed in cancer metastases. For better understanding of the role of PRL-3 in tumor metastasis, we applied a rapid and efficient method for generating PRL-3 floxed mice and investigated its phenotypes. A BAC retrieval strategy was applied to construct the PRL-3 conditional gene-targeting vector. Exon 4 was selected for deletion to generate a nonfunctional prematurely terminated short peptide as it will cause a frame-shift mutation. Conditional knockout PRL-3 mice were generated by using the Cre-loxP system and were validated by Southern blot and RT-PCR analysis. Further analysis revealed the phenotype characteristics of PRL-3 knockout mice and wildtype mice. In this study, we successfully constructed the PRL-3 conditional knockout mice, which will be helpful to clarify the roles of PRL-3 and the mechanisms in tumor metastasis.