Generation of cell lines stably expressing a fluorescent reporter of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay activity

Abstract

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is a mechanism of mRNA surveillance ubiquitous among eukaryotes. Importantly, NMD not only removes aberrant transcripts with premature stop codons, but also regulates expression of many normal genes. A recently introduced dual-color fluorescent protein-based reporter enables analysis of NMD activity in live cells. In this chapter we describe the method to generate stable transgenic cell lines expressing the splicing-dependent NMD reporter using consecutive steps of lentivirus transduction and Tol2 transposition.