Lentiviral Mediated Production of Transgenic Mice: A Simple and Highly Efficient Method for Direct Study of Founders

For almost 40 years, pronuclear DNA injection represents the standard method to generate transgenic mice with random integration of transgenes. Such a routine procedure is widely utilized throughout the world and its main limitation resides in the poor efficacy of transgene integration, resulting in a low yield of founder animals. Only few percent of animals born after implantation of injected fertilized oocytes have integrated the transgene. In contrast, lentiviral vectors are powerful tools for integrative gene transfer and their use to transduce fertilized oocytes allows highly efficient production of founder transgenic mice with an average yield above 70%. Furthermore, any mouse strain can be used to produce transgenic animal and the penetrance of transgene expression is extremely high, above 80% with lentiviral mediated transgenesis compared to DNA microinjection. The size of the DNA fragment that can be cargo by the lentiviral vector is restricted to 10 kb and represents the major limitation of this method. Using a simple and easy to perform injection procedure beneath the zona pellucida of fertilized oocytes, more than 50 founder animals can be produced in a single session of microinjection. Such a method is highly adapted to perform, directly in founder animals, rapid gain and loss of function studies or to screen genomic DNA regions for their ability to control and regulate gene expression in vivo.