Analysis of lentiviral vector splicing events with nanopore sequencing

All lentiviral vectors derived from HIV-1 have the major splice donor (SD1) in the 5’ leader region and splice acceptor 7 (SA7) within the env region. Splicing events decrease the amount of full-length RNA available for packaging into virions and could lead to packaging of genomes containing internal deletions. Because there are splice sites or splicing enhancer/silencer elements in both gag and env, we compared how deleting each region affected intracellular genomic RNA splicing in RNA isolated from transfected HEK293Tsa cells. Oxford Nanopore direct cDNA sequencing was used to characterize the splice variants because the long-read length allows full-length transcripts to be analyzed. We show that deleting 507 nt of env, including the SA7, decreased the number of splicing events per transcript and increased the proportion of unspliced genomic RNAs ~3-fold in the cell. The usage of canonical and cryptic splice sites in wildtype lentiviral vector and four mutant vectors was evaluated