Alain Kohl, Professor in Virology at LSTM, talks reporter gene experiments and HiBiT

In this short video, Alain Kohl, Professor in Virology at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) talks about the advantages of HiBiT.

He believes the advantage of using a shorter sequence, like HiBiT, "is that if we want to produce a virus for reporter gene experiments, we don't need to dramatically increase the length of the viral genome and we don't need to replace a viral protein by luciferase, for example, because that does have deleterious effects. To some extent, there could be attenuation, virus replication might be impeded in one way or another. And so by using a very short stretch that we insert, we hope that we avoid largely these deleterious effects on viruses.

"Being able to then probe the tag also with antibodies, for example, makes it possible for us to then also look at expression in different manners, to look at interactions, and so on. So we probably get better data really by using a shorter tag that we can also use as a reporter."