AAV with tMCK promoter driven Venus

This AAV expresses Venus driven by a muscle tMCK promoter.

tMCK is constructed by ligating a triple tandem copies of mouse MCK enhancer ( about200 bps each) to the ~100bp mouse MCK basal promoter.). This promoter shows extremely sensitive tissue-specificity: (1) In differentiated C2C12 myotubes, the tMCK promoter is 30-50 fold stronger than the Enh358MCK promoter and 10-20 fold stronger than the CMV promoter; (2) In muscle tissue, tMCK promoter is 15-20 fold stronger than the Enh358MCK promoter, and 3-5 fold stronger than the CMV promoter; (3) Strong tissue-specificity: in liver tissue, the expression level from tMCK promoter is only about 0.3-0.5% of that of the CMV promoter.

Like mCitrine and EYFP, Venus was developed in an effort to get better variants of YFP in terms of brightness and photo-stability. Venus has an Excitation/Emission spectrum of 515nm/529nm which is almost identical to that of EYFP and mCitrine.