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Independent and high-level dual-gene expression in adult stem-progenitor cells from a single lentiviral vector

Gene Therapy volume 16, pages 874–884 (2009)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 06 September 2012

Abstract

Expression of multiple genes from the same target cell is required in several technological and therapeutic applications such as quantitative measurements of promoter activity or in vivo tracking of stem cells. In spite of such need, reaching independent and high-level dual-gene expression cannot be reliably accomplished by current gene transfer vehicles. To address this issue, we designed a lentiviral vector carrying two transcriptional units separated by polyadenylation, terminator and insulator sequences. With this design, the expression level of both genes was as high as that yielded from lentiviral vectors containing only a single transcriptional unit. Similar results were observed with several promoters and cell types including epidermal keratinocytes, bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells and hair follicle stem cells. Notably, we demonstrated quantitative dynamic monitoring of gene expression in primary cells with no need for selection protocols suggesting that this optimized lentivirus may be useful in high-throughput gene expression profiling studies.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 EB000876-01, R01 HL086582) and the New York Stem Cell Science Funding Program (NYSTEM) to STA. We thank Dr Arul Jayaraman (Texas A&M University) for providing the plasmids containing the NF-κB and AP-1 response elements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Bioengineering Laboratory, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Amherst, NY, USA

    J Tian & S T Andreadis

  2. Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA

    S T Andreadis

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  1. J Tian
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Correspondence to S T Andreadis.

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Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on Gene Therapy website (http://www.nature.com/gt)

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Tian, J., Andreadis, S. Independent and high-level dual-gene expression in adult stem-progenitor cells from a single lentiviral vector. Gene Ther 16, 874–884 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/gt.2009.46

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