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Published July 2005 | public
Journal Article

Single Cell Kinetics of Intracellular, Nonviral, Nucleic Acid Delivery Vehicle Acidification and Trafficking

Abstract

Mechanistic understanding of the intracellular trafficking of nonviral nucleic acid delivery vehicles remains elusive. A live, single cell-based assay is described here that is used to investigate and quantitate the spatiotemporal, intracellular pH microenvironment of polymeric-based nucleic acid delivery vehicles. Polycations such as polyethylenimine (PEI), poly-L-lysine (PLL), β-cyclodextrin-containing polymers lacking or possessing imidazole termini (CDP or CDP-imid), and cyclodextrin-grafted PEI (CD-PEI) are used to deliver an oligonucleotide containing a single fluorophore with two emission lines that can be employed to measure the pH. Delivery vehicles were also sterically stabilized by addition of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) and investigated. The intracellular trafficking data obtained via this new methodology show that vectors such as PEI and CDP-imid can buffer the endocytic vesicles while PLL and CDP do not. Additionally, the PEGylated vectors reveal the same buffering capacity as their unstabilized variants. Here, the live cell, spatiotemporal mapping of these behaviors is demonstrated and, when combined with cell uptake and luciferase expression data, shows that there is not a correlation between buffering capacity and gene expression.

Additional Information

© 2005 American Chemical Society. Received March 16, 2005; Revised Manuscript Received May 10, 2005. Publication Date (Web): June 28, 2005. We thank Dr. John Murphy for helpful discussions. R.P. Kulkarni acknowledges support from an NDSEG fellowship. We thank Insert Therapeutics, Inc., for partial support of this work. M. E. Davis is a consultant to and has financial interest in Insert Therapeutics, Inc.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023