Experimental results have suggested that transgene expression can be saturated when large amounts of plasmid vectors are delivered into cells. To investigate this saturation kinetic behavior, cells were transfected with monitoring and competing plasmids using cationic liposomes. Even although an identical amount of a monitoring plasmid expressing firefly luciferase (FL) was used for transfection, transgene expression from the plasmid was greatly affected by the level of transgene expression from competing plasmids expressing renilla luciferase (RL).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Hydrodynamic injection has been shown to reactivate silenced transgene expression in mouse liver. In this study, the roles of inflammatory cytokines and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the reactivation were examined.
Methods: Production of inflammatory cytokines and ROS by hydrodynamic injection of saline was examined in mice that had received a hydrodynamic injection of a plasmid expressing Gaussia luciferase.
Altered expression of beta-catenin, a key component of the Wnt signaling pathway, is involved in a variety of cancers because increased levels of beta-catenin protein are frequently associated with enhanced cellular proliferation. Although our previous study demonstrated that gene silencing of beta-catenin in melanoma B16-BL6 cells by plasmid DNA (pDNA) expressing short-hairpin RNA targeting the gene (pshbeta-catenin) markedly suppressed their growth in vivo, gene silencing of beta-catenin could promote tumor metastasis by the rearranging cell adhesion complex. In this study, we investigated how silencing of beta-catenin affects metastatic aspects of melanoma cells.
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