transfection

Small RNA Transfection: How Small Players Can Make a Big Impact

Posted on by Simon Moe

When looking at small aspects of living things, especially cells, it can often be difficult to fully grasp the magnitude of regulation employed within them. We first learn the central dogma in high school biology. This is the core concept that DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein. Despite this early education, it can be lost on many the biological methods that are employed to regulate this process. This regulation is very important when one considers the disastrous things that can occur when this process goes askew, such as cancer, or dysregulated cell death. Therefor it is very important to understand how these regulatory mechanisms work and employ tools to better understand them.

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Insects and Science: Optimizing Work with Sf9 Insect Cells

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Insects are a keystone species in the animal kingdom, often providing invaluable benefits to terrestrial ecosystems and useful services to mankind. While many of them are seen as pests (think mosquitos), others are important for pollination, waste management, and even scientific research.

Insect biotechnology, or the use of insect-derived molecules and cells to develop products, is applied in a diverse set of scientific fields including agricultural, industrial, and medical biotechnology. Insect cells have been central to many scientific advances, being utilized in recombinant protein, baculovirus, and vaccine and viral pesticide production, among other applications (5).

Therefore, as the use of insect cells becomes more widespread, understanding how they are produced, their research applications, and the scientific products that can be used with them is crucial to fostering further scientific advancements.

Primary Cell Cultures and Cell Lines

Cell culture - Cell lines - Insect Cells

In general, experimentation with individual cells, rather than full animal models, is advantageous due to improved reproducibility, decreased space requirements, less ethical concerns, and a reduction in expense. This makes primary cell cultures and cell lines essential contributors to basic scientific research.

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Tips for Successful Dual-Reporter Assays

Posted on by Ben Schmidt

Updated 02/12/2021

Previously, we described some of the advantages of using dual-reporter assays (such as the Dual-Luciferase®, Dual-Glo® Luciferase and the Nano-Glo® Dual-Luciferase® Systems). Another post describes how to choose the best dual-reporter assay for your experiments. For an overview of luciferase-based reporter gene assays, see this short video:

These assays are relatively easy to understand in principle. Use a primary and secondary reporter vector transiently transfected into your favorite mammalian cell line. The primary reporter is commonly used as a marker for a gene, promoter, or response element of interest. The secondary reporter drives a steady level of expression of a different marker. We can use that second marker to normalize the changes in expression of the primary under the assumption that the secondary marker is unaffected by what is being experimentally manipulated.

While there are many advantages to dual-reporter assays, they require careful planning to avoid common pitfalls. Here’s what you can do to avoid repeating some of the common mistakes we see with new users:

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I Have My Luciferase Vector, Now What?

Posted on by Joliene Lindholm
Choosing and Optimizing Transfection Methods

Here in Technical Services we often talk with researchers at the beginning of their project about how to carefully design and get started with their experiments. It is exciting when you have selected the Luciferase Reporter Vector(s) that will best suit your needs; you are going to make luminescent cells! But, how do you pick the best way to get the vector into your cells to express the reporter? What transfection reagent/method will work best for your cell type and experiment? Do you want to do transient (short-term) transfections, or are you going to establish a stable cell line?

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Nano, Nano: Tiny Lipid Particles with Big Therapeutic Potential

Posted on by Ken Doyle
cell-transfection-viafect-luciferase-assay

Getting DNA or RNA into cells can be a tricky business, and a variety of transfection reagents have been developed over the years to make the process easier. Lipid-based reagents are especially popular because they combine efficient transfection with relatively low toxicity.

When it comes to transfection, it pays to think small. Human cells range in volume from 20–40 µm3 (sperm cells) to as large as 4 million µm3 (mature egg cells, or oocytes). For several decades, transfection reagents have targeted this size range. However, breakthrough research involves leaving the “micro” realm and entering a world that was once the domain only of science fiction: nanotechnology.

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ViaFect™ Reagent: Building Assays in Difficult Cells

Posted on by Kyle Hooper

Transfection can sometimes seem more like an art than a science—the perfect transfection experiment being dependent on optimization of conditions, including cell density, transfection reagent and DNA:reagent ratio. No one reagent is perfect for every cell type, so there is the added challenge of optimizing performance in your cell line of choice—which may fall into the well-populated “difficult-to-transfect” category  that includes many primary cells.

Among transfection reagents, Lipofectamine® (Thermofisher), and FuGENE® (Promega) are popular and widely used choices. Viafect™ Transfection Reagent is newer and less well-known, but gaining popularity as a high-performance, low-toxicity reagent that performs well across a wide range of cell lines. In head-to-head comparisons with FuGENE and Lipofectamine, Viafect outperformed or equaled the others for expression of transfected reporter genes and resulting cell viability (see the data in this article).

The story of ViaFect begins with Promega Custom Assay Services (CAS), a group that uses Promega technologies to construct made-to-order assays, typically in a cell line. Many projects from the CAS group involve transfecting cells with expression vectors and reporter vectors. In some instances, customers contact CAS to have an assay constructed in a difficult cell line, after attempting and failing, or experiencing difficulty building the assay themselves.

CAS projects start with a proof-of-concept experiment using transient transfection before moving on to production of a clonal, stable cell line. For difficult cell lines, the CAS group previously turned to electroporation after exhausting lipid-based transfection options. Electroporation often worked, but success came with a price—cytotoxicity. The CAS group challenged R&D to find a better solution—better transfection with low toxicity for difficult-to-use cells. The result of that challenge is the ViaFect™ Transfection Reagent. Continue reading “ViaFect™ Reagent: Building Assays in Difficult Cells”

Improving the Success of Your Transfection

Posted on by Sara Klink
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Not every lab has a tried and true transfection protocol that can be used by all lab members. Few researchers will use the same cell type and same construct to generate data. Many times, a scientist may need to transfect different constructs or even different molecules (e.g., short-interfering RNA [siRNA]) into the same cell line, or test a single construct in different cultured cell lines. One construct could be easily transfected into several different cell lines or a transfection protocol may work for several different constructs. However, some cells like primary cells can be difficult to transfect and some nucleic acids will need to be optimized for successful transfection. Here are some tips that may help you improve your transfection success.

Transfect healthy, actively dividing cells at a consistent cell density. Cells should be at a low passage number and 50–80% confluent when transfected. Using the same cell density reduces variability for replicates. Keep cells Mycoplasma-free to ensure optimal growth.

Transfect using high-quality DNA. Transfection-quality DNA is free from protein, RNA and chemical contamination with an A260/A280 ratio of 1.7–1.9. Prepare purified DNA in sterile water or TE buffer at a final concentration of 0.2–1mg/ml.

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General Considerations for Transfection

Posted on by Sara Klink

Many studies, from reporter assays to protein localization to BRET and FRET, require successful transfection first. Yet, transfection can be tricky and difficult. There are many considerations when planning transfection of your cells including reagent selection, stable or transient experiment, type of molecule and endpoint assay used. Here we discuss these considerations to help you plan a successful transfection scheme for your experimental system. Continue reading “General Considerations for Transfection”

Get More Out of Your Lentiviral Production

Posted on by Promega

fugene6_lvv_blogThis review is a guest blog by Amy Landreman, Product Specialist in Cellular Analysis at Promega Corporation.

Lentiviral vectors (LVV) have become a valuable research tool for delivering genetic content into a wide range of cell types. Commonly derived from the HIV-1 genome, LVV have the advantage of being able to infect both dividing and non-dividing cells. They can be particularly valuable for introducing genetic material into cell lines that are difficult to transfect using other methods and are also being used in gene therapy applications.

Unlike other gene delivery tools, transducing mammalian cells with LVV requires significant upfront effort since the LVV particles carrying the desired genetic content first need to be created. In general this involves co-transfecting a packaging cell line, such as HEK293T, with a set of three to four separate plasmids that encode the protein content required to generate the LVV particles: the transfer plasmid, which contains the transgene of interest, a packaging plasmid, and an envelope plasmid. After co-transfection, the packaging cell line is allowed to incubate for a couple of days during which time the LVV particles are produced and accumulating in the culture supernatant. The supernatant containing the recombinant LVV is then harvested and, following several concentration steps, the LVV particles are ready to be used for introducing the desired genetic content into the mammalian target cells. Continue reading “Get More Out of Your Lentiviral Production”