Use of polyethyleneimine polymer in cell culture as attachment factor and lipofection enhancer

BACKGROUND: Several cell lines and primary cultures benefit from the use of positively charged extracellular matrix proteins or polymers that enhance their ability to attach to culture plates. Polyethyleneimine is a positively charged polymer that has gained recent attention as a transfection reagent. A less known use of this cationic polymer as an attachment factor was explored with several cell lines. RESULTS: Polyethyleneimine compared favorably to traditional attachment factors such as collagen and polylysine. PC-12 and HEK-293 cells plated on dishes coated with polyethyleneimine showed a homogeneous distribution of cells in the plate, demonstrating strong cell adhesion that survived washing procedures. The polymer could also be used to enhance the adherence and allow axonal outgrowth from zebrafish retinal explants. The effects of this coating agent on the transfection of loosely attaching cell lines were studied. Pre-coating with polyethyleneimine had the effect of enhancing the transfection yield in procedures using lipofection reagents. CONCLUSION: Polyethyleneimine is an effective attachment factor for weakly anchoring cell lines and primary cells. Its use in lipofection protocols makes the procedures more reliable and increases the yield of expressed products with commonly used cell lines such as PC-12 and HEK-293 cells

Transfection yields were determined by β-galactosidase assays and normalized to the yields obtained with PEI coating of the culture dish (to which it was assigned an arbitrary value of 100

<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "Use of polyethyleneimine polymer in cell culture as attachment factor and lipofection enhancer"</p><p>BMC Biotechnology 2004;4():23-23.</p><p>Published online 15 Oct 2004</p><p>PMCID:PMC526208.</p><p>Copyright © 2004 Vancha et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.</p>0%). PEI and other attachment factors enhanced the transfection of loosely attaching cell lines such as PC-12 cells (graph A) and HEK-293 cells (graph B). No significant effect was observed with tightly attaching cells such as MYS fibroblasts (graph C). The bars show the average ± standard deviation of triplicate assays, which are representative of at least two independent experiments (* significantly higher than untreated control, p < 0.01)