AAV with CAG2 promoter driven TdTomato

This AAV expresses TdTomato driven by an ubiquitous CAG2 promoter.

The CAG2 promoter is derived from the commonly used 1.8kb CAG/CBA (also called CAGGS) promoter. To increase the cloning capacity of size-limiting vectors using the CAG promoter, such as AAV or lentiviral vectors, CAG2 was developed by deleting a portion of about 0.6Kb of the chicken beta-actin intron from the original CAG promoter.

dTomato belongs to a family of fluorescent proteins called mFruit. Two dTomato units were joined head-to-tail through a linker, yielding a tandem dimer fluorescent protein, tdTomato. The tdTomato derivative is the brightest fluorescent protein yet reported, featuring an orange-red emission maximum at 581nm and is one of the most photo-stable fluorescent proteins. Other fluorescent proteins with similar emission spectra include DsRed, DsRed2, TurboRFP, TagRFP, and TagRFP-T.