Cell Transfection: Lipofectamine™ vs Transfectamine™
Transfection is the process of deliberately introducing naked or purified nucleic acids into eukaryotic cells by non-viral methods. It can be achieved by physical or chemical techniques.
Physical methods like electroporation or microinjection tend to have low efficiency and damage cells. Chemical-based transfection uses materials ranging from inexpensive calcium phosphate and organic dendrimers to advanced ones such as lipofection (lipid transfection) reagents like Lipofectamine™ and Transfectamine™, but must be optimized.
There are 2 key issues with transfection: one is to improve the transfection efficiency and the other is to minimize the cytotoxicity associated with performing the transfection process. Through rigorous in-house testing, we have successfully shown that cells transfected with Transfectamine™ 5000 provides much higher transfection efficiency with low cytotoxicity, as compared with similar reagents.
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Transfection efficiency comparison in CHO-K1 cells. CHO-K1 cells were cultured in 6-well plate to ~90% confluency. 2.5 ug of GFP plasmid was transfected with Lipofectamine™ 2000, Lipofectamine™ 3000 and Transfectamine™ 5000. Images were taken 24 hours post transfection with fluorescent microscope through FITC channel.
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