TransIT®-Lenti Transfection Reagent, manufactured by Mirus Bio, US, is designed to enhance delivery of packaging and transfer vectors to adherent HEK 293T cell types and increase recombinant lentivirus production.

Lentivirus is an enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus from the Retroviridae family capable of infecting both dividing and non-dividing cells. In conjunction with an efficient host-genome integration mechanism, this capability has led to recombinant lentivirus becoming a central gene delivery tool for robust and stable transgene expression in target cells.

To produce lentivirus, cells are transfected with packaging plasmids encoding the required gag, pol, and rev structural and regulatory genes as well as a transfer vector encoding the gene of interest (GOI). Replication incompetence is achieved by expressing the minimal virus components on separate plasmids and incorporating the self in-activating (SIN) elements through a major deletion of the 3′ long terminal repeat (LTR) within the