Cell transfection is no longer your Roadblock to publication.

Cell Transfection allows researchers to manipulate gene expression in cells. In order to evaluate physiological or pathological processes, your specific protein of interest can be expressed, or depleted by means of cell transfection. Furthermore, the new field of molecular imaging allows visualization of molecular mechanisms of disease in real time, non-invasively with reporter genes, expressed by means of cell transfection.

Traditional methods of cell transfection include non-viral, lipid mediated transfection or electroporation of plasmids. However, for many cell types, researcher experience inefficient tranfection and poor cell survival. In brief this is a laborious, time consumptive process, often experienced as a hindrance to research progress and publication.

"In Vivo Imaging Solutions" recognizes the bottleneck of cell transfection faced by researchers. In Vivo Imaging Solutions developed a streamlined high efficiency lentiviral transduction method and provides researchers with a cost effective cell transfection solution. 

"In Vivo Imaging Solutions" creates your custom, stable, monoclonal, high expressor cell line in 4-8 weeks. First, we create your construct in the appropriate lentiviral vector for gene expression, RNAi or imaging. Next, we generate lentiviral particles and we transfect your cell line. Finally, we select the highest expressing, stable monoclone and ship this clone back to you.

Why opt for a lentivirus?

Lentivirus, adenovirus and AAV can infect both dividing and non-dividing cells, have low cytogenicity and can integrate into the host genome. Lentiviruses tend to stably integrate in high transcription units. Lentiviruses infect a broad spectrum of mammalian cell types and are able to maintain long-term expression. Lentiviral vectors hold two key advantages over AAV vectors: (a) lentiviruses allow for a larger packaging capacity (8–10 kb) compared to less than 5 kb for AAV and (b) the majority of self-inactivating (SIN) HIV-based infective lentiviral particles become integrated into the genome three days after infection  as compared to less than 10% for AAV (Dissen et al., 2009).

In the next newsletters we will follow up with a series of white papers discussing gene expression, plasmids, promoters, (imaging) reporter genes, RNAi, bi/tri-cistronics, animal and tissue transgenesis. If you would like to find out more about custom lentivirus and cell transfection, visit: www.invivoimagingsolutions.com

Reference:

Comparison of gene-transfer efficiency in human embryonic stem cells. Cao et al., Mol. Imaging Biol. 12(1):15-24, 2010.