Are the plasmids made available through Invitrogen identical to the system described on the website?
No, the plasmids made available through Invitrogen have a different backbone than the ones used at Inovio. pSwitch and pGene/V5-His (Invitrogen plasmids) contain additional eukaryotic transcription units driven by the SV40 promoter (Hygromycin resistance for pSwitch and Zeocine resistance for pGene/V5-His) for effective selection in mammalian cells. Both Invitrogen plasmids contain the Ampicillin resistance gene for bacterial selection. The pGene/V5-His plasmid also contains a C-terminal polyhistidine (6xHis) tag for rapid purification or detection (with Anti-His (C-term) antibodies) of the induced transgene of interest. The Inovio plasmid backbone is based on pUC-18 with the Ampicillin resistance gene replaced by the Kanamycin resistance gene.
