Retroviral Transduction of Quiescent Murine Hematopoietic Stem Cells

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) represent an important target cell population in bone marrow transplantation, cell and gene therapy applications, and the development of leukemia models for research. Because the hematopoietic progeny carries the genetic information of HSCs and replenishes the blood and immune system, corrective gene transfer into HSCs provides an ideal therapeutic approach for many monogenic hematological diseases and a useful tool for studies of HSC function and blood formation in normal and malignant hematopoiesis. However, the efficiency of gene transfer into HSCs has been limited by several features of viral vectors, viral titer, methods of viral transduction, and the property of stem cell quiescence. In this chapter, we describe the production of retrovirus using murine stem cell virus (MSCV)-based retroviral vectors and purification and transduction of murine HSCs.