Janurary 7, 2005
Optimizing a technique for generating recombinant adenoviruses
Maira Soto, Dr Luis P. Villarreal & Dr. Toai Nguyen,
Center for Virus Research,
UC Irvine
Abstract: For the past 17 years special enfaces has
been placed on adenoviruses because of their ability to express
foreign proteins and to transfer and express therapeutic genes.
Furthermore, adenoviruses are advantageous to use for gene therapy
because they can infect different cell types, both proliferating
and quiescent, also their genomes do not integrate into the host
cell genome. Although much research has been conducted on techniques
for efficiently producing these vectors there are still aspects
of their production that may be optimized. The rate-limiting
step in the generation of recombinant adenoviruses is the cloning
and so it is where the most work needs to be done. In our studies
we will clone two different inserts, the two shorter fragments
containing the green fluorescent protein gene (GFP) and the red
fluorescent protein gene (RFP) as well as the longer lac Z insert.
The inserts we are using were chosen because both segments are
easy markers to test the production of the recombinant adenoviruses.
In all cases the aim of the study is to optimize the technique
for future experiments.