To further unravel the role of P2X7 receptor signaling in basic and translational neuropsychiatry in general and in the context of anxiety and depression research in particular, we generated a novel mouse line in which the known murine splice variants are disrupted and substituted by a fusion transcript comprising P2rx7 exon 1 which is spliced to a tau-lacZ reporter gene. Here, P2RX7 is linked to depressive symptom measurement.