The Lentiviral Core Facility at the Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science of St. Michael’s Hospital facilitates the production of small scale lentiviral stocks containing shRNA or cDNA for your gene(s) of interest, as well as offering technical support with lentiviral concentration, titrations and transductions. To ensure the compliance with biosafety containment required for lentiviral-based research, the facility encourages the use of the 3rd generation Open Biosystems Translenti Packaging System (pdf file).
To obtain access to the lentivirus core facility, one must first contact the Research Biosafety Officer for safety training and show an understanding of the operating procedures for the lentivirus lab. For assistance with packaging, titreing or MOI calculations, please contact the Molecular Biology Core Specialist.
For obtaining human cDNAs, the facility recommends clones from the human ORFeome (validated protein-coding) set available from SPARC BioCentre at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Individual cDNAs can be distributed or flipped into a constitutive lentiviral expression vector (i.e. pLEX_305, plasmid #41390 available from Addgene) through SPARC. Contact cfladd@sickkids.ca or visit Sick Kids Hospital.
