Comparison of ectopic gene expression methods in rat neural stem cells.

Neural stem cells (NSCs) have the ability to proliferate and differentiate into various types of cells that compose the nervous system. To study functions of genes in stem cell biology, genes or siRNAs need to be transfected. However, it is difficult to transfect ectopic genes into NSCs. Thus to identify the suitable method to achieve high transfection efficiency, we compared lipid transfection, electroporation, nucleofection and retroviral transduction. Among the methods that we tested, we found that nucleofection and retroviral transduction showed significantly increased transfection efficiency. In addition, with retroviral transduction of Ngn2 that is known to induce neurogenesis in various types of cells, we observed facilitated final cell division in rat NSCs. These data suggest that nucleofection and retroviral transduction provide high efficiency of gene delivery system to study functions of genes in rat NSCs.