Delivering Morpholinos into cultured cells
Bare Morpholinos oligos, like all antisense molecules, need assistance to efficiently penetrate the plasma membrane of cultured eukaryotic cells. You will need some sort of delivery strategy to get the oligos into the cytosol. Options for Morpholino delivery into cultured cells include:- Vivo-Morpholinos (Morpholinos covalently linked to a delivery moiety);
- Endo-Porter (our best separate delivery reagent, a peptide, for delivering unmodified or labeled Morpholinos to cultured cells);
- Special Delivery (our discontinued delivery system, using ethoxylated polyethylenimine and Morpholino/DNA heteroduplexes, now replaced by Endo-Porter);
- Scrape loading (a technique for adherent cells) or syringe loading (for suspension cells);
- Microinjection (this works great, but requires great patience for cell culture!);
- Electroporation (often used for chick embryos, works in cell cultures).
Vivo-Morpholinos can be used in most cell cultures with no additional delivery agent needed. For delivering unmodified or fluorescent-tagged Morpholino oligos into cultured cells, Gene Tools makes Endo-Porter delivery reagent and resells Sarstedt cell scrapers. Gene Tools also provides protocols for making Special Delivery heteroduplex oligos and provides EPEI delivery reagent to release the heteroduplexes from endosomes.
For delivery in adult animals, we recommend our Vivo-Morpholinos.