Lentiviral expression vectors are the most effective tools for transducing and stably expressing different effector molecules (cDNA, DNA fragments, siRNA, antisense, ribozymes, etc.) or reporter constructs in virtually any mammalian cell, including nondividing cells and whole model organisms. Like standard plasmid vectors, it is able to introduce lentiviral constructs in plasmid form into the cells with low-to-medium efficiency and get transient expression of effectors by conventional transfection protocols. Through packaging the lentiviral expression construct into pseudoviral particles, we can obtain highly efficient transduction, even with the most difficult to transfect cells, such as primary, stem, and differentiated cells. Recombinant lentiviral vectors (rLV) are widely used due to the following features:
- Lentiviral vectors can accommodate long sequences;
- Lentiviruses seem to be non-immunogenic due to lack of viral coding sequence transfer;
- Lentiviruses are able to transduce non-dividing cells;
- Proteins can be stably expressed because of integration into the cell chromosome.
Nevertheless, production of recombinant lentiviral vectors is hard and challenging, especially when high titer of recombinant lentiviral vectors (>107 transducing unit (TU)/ml) are required. Through the QVirus™ platform at Creative Biogene, we have been generated more lentiviruses than other popular systems. Lentiviruses generated from QVirus™ platform have high safety profile and high efficiency of gene delivery to almost all cell types and whole model organisms.
