Magnetofection potentiates gene delivery to cultured endothelial cells

Modification of cellular functions by overexpression of genes is
increasingly practised for research of signalling pathways, but
restricted by limitations of low efficiency. We investigated
whether the novel technique of magnetofection (MF) could enhance
gene transfer to cultured primary endothelial cells. MF of human
umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) increased transfection
efficiency of a luciferase reporter gene up to 360-fold compared to
various conventional transfection systems. In contrast, there was
only an up to 1.6-fold increase in toxicity caused by MF suggesting
that the advantages of MF outbalanced the increase in toxicity. MF
efficiently increased transfection efficiency using several
commercially available cationic lipid transfection reagents and
polyethyleneimine (PEI). Using PEI, even confluent HUVEC could be
efficiently transfected to express luciferase activity. Using a
green fluorescent protein vector maximum percentages of transfected
cells amounted up to 38.7% while PEI without MF resulted in only
1.3% transfected cells. Likewise, in porcine aortic endothelial
cells MF increased expression of a luciferase or beta-galactosidase
reporter, reaching an efficiency of 37.5% of cells. MF is an
effective tool for pDNA transfection of endothelial cells allowing
high efficiencies. It may be of great use for investigating protein
function in cell culture experiments.