Lentiviral vector injection

One of the most interesting recent developments in the applications of lentiviral vectors is their use for generating transgenic animals as an alternative method to standard DNA pronuclear injection. The advantage of lentiviral vector mediated transgenesis is that its simple and high efficient with on average (calculation based on approximately 10000 injections performed at EPFL) of 67% of the resulting animals carried the provirus. Moreover, the technology developed around the lentiviral vectors were rapidly applied to transgenesis such as constitutive or controllable knock down using small hairpin RNA technology which lower the need for costly and time consuming knock out experiments. In the platform we have successfully used the method to carry out various studies such as transgene or promoter evaluation, and enhancer screening. The platform provides an all-round service: starting from high quality production of lentiviral vector, generation of transgenic mice using perivitelline injection of oocytes, to genotyping of animals allowing the delivery of only positive progenies. The complete procedure is extremely fast as it can be performed in around 10 weeks. The core is located at EPFL, and consists of one P2 for lentiviral vector production and titration, one P2 for the injection and one animal housing room with a capacity of around 1000 mice under high quality sanitary status.

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