Cre recombinase is a 38 kDa enzyme derived from the bacteriophage P1 which specifically recognizes 34 bp loxP sites.
Cre has been shown to effectively mediate the excision of DNA flanked by loxP sites.
Cre-loxP system is a very useful tool for time-space-specific knock-out the genes which can not be investigated in adults because of their embryonic lethality in conventional gene-targetting.