Hi, I have a question about the retroviral infection. We routinely use this method for exogenous gene induction. Theoretically, the infected cells shall express the gene stably. However, I observed that if I culture the cell for long time, I cannot detect the high expression of the protein, although the cells are resistant to the antibiotics selection. What are the potential causes?
by analogy, when a toxic protein is expressed in E. coli, E. coli can shut down the toxic protein expression while maintaining resistance to the antibiotic due to the resistance gene on the plasmid which is "not" shut down.
Agree with Gary - same scenario in mammalian cells, this is gene/protein dependent of course and it is usually some epigenetic mechanism i.e. methylation of the promoter region to silence it. Not much you can practically do about it, I believe....
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