Fig. 2.

Effect of 5’ leader length on translation levels. (a) Diagram of reporter constructs containing either the slp or hTEE-658 upstream of a leader sequence of varying length, followed by the coding region for the firefly luciferase protein. Luciferase levels were determined by transfect-infect assay using reporters that contain either no inserted leader sequence (none) or a designed sequence consisting of 30 nucleotides (nts) (b, c), 60 nts (d, e) or 90 nts (f, g). Assays were conducted in HeLa cells using the Copenhagen strain of VACV, and in each case results were made relative to those when no leader sequence was present. All experiments were conducted in triplicate at minimum. Error is reported as standard deviation.