The Sleeping Beauty transposon toolbox.

Ismahen Ammar, Zsuzsanna Izsvák, Zoltán Ivics

Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany.

Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) 2012

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The mobility of class II transposable elements (DNA transposons) can be experimentally controlled by separating the two functional components of the transposon: the terminal inverted repeat sequences that flank a gene of interest to be mobilized and the transposase protein that can be conditionally supplied to drive the transposition reaction. Thus, a DNA molecule of interest (e.g., a fluorescent marker, an shRNA expression cassette, a mutagenic gene trap or a therapeutic gene construct) cloned between the inverted repeat sequences of a transposon-based vector can be stably integrated into the genome in a regulated and highly efficient manner. Sleeping Beauty (SB) was the first transposon ever shown capable of gene transfer in vertebrate cells, and recent results confirm that SB supports a full spectrum of genetic engineering in vertebrate species, including transgenesis, insertional mutagenesis, and therapeutic somatic gene, transfer both ex vivo and in vivo. This methodological paradigm opened up a number of avenues for genome manipulations for basic and applied research. This review highlights the state-of-the-art in SB transposon technology in diverse genetic applications with special emphasis on the transposon as well as transposase vectors currently available in the SB transposon toolbox.

Citation

Ismahen Ammar, Zsuzsanna Izsvák, Zoltán Ivics. The Sleeping Beauty transposon toolbox. Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.). 2012;859:229-40