Application of PEI-Modified Magnetic Nanoparticles as Gene Transfer Vector for the Genetic Modification of Animals.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Materials Science and Engineering Volume 2012, Article ID 764521, 6 pages doi:10.1155/2012/764521 Research Article Application of PEI-Modified Magnetic Nanoparticles as Gene Transfer Vector for the Genetic Modification of Animals Jinhui Cui,1 Haixin Cui,1 Yan Wang,1 Changjiao Sun,1 Kui Li,2 Hongyan Ren,2 and Wei Du1 1 Research Center for Nanoscale Science in Agriculture, Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China 2 Institute of Animal Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China Correspondence should be addressed to Haixin Cui, haixincui@ Received 18 August 2011; Revised 16 November 2011; Accepted 20 November 2011 Academic Editor: Piao Liu Copyright © 2012 Jinhui Cui et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To evaluate the performance of the magnetic nanoparticles as gene transfer vector for breeding transgenic animals, we investigated a new approach to deliver green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene to porcine kidney 15 (PK-15) and porcine embryonic fibroblast (PEF) cells using PEI-modified magnetic nanoparticles as gene vector. The morphology of the nanoparticles and nanoparticle/DNA complexes was characterized using scanning electron microscopy. It was found that the surface of the particles becomes coarse and rough with increased average diameter, which implied the effective conjugating between nanoparticles with DNA. The zeta potential of nanoparticle/DNA complexes drops down from +29.4 mV to +2