Recommendation of transfection reagents - (Oct/19/2005 )

As lnvitrogen increased the price of lipofectamine 2000 transfection reagent, my lab will not use it any more, so does anybody recommend me some cheaper but effective transfection reagents from other biotech companies? thanks.

--Jason

i use the "old" lipofectamine which is very good on 293 cells and on every first assays.
Extreme gene works better one hela cells "in my hands".
for hard transfectable, i've succesfully tested (but only once) the gene porter2 system
fred

Talking about transfections... I just used lipofectamine2000 on U87-cells. After transfection for 6 hours with lipofectamine2000 (24 µg of DNA in a 100mm petri dish) I replaced the medium and at that moment the cells were looking okay. Now, two days after transfection most of my cells are dead. During transfection, there was serum but no antibiotics present in the medium (Invitrogen suggests that medium can be present during transfection).

Other than comparing with and without medium during transfection (during a control transfection tomorrow I will use a reporter-gene in a plasmid) what other factors can I compare? The number of washes after removing transfection medium? The addition of antibiotics right after transfection?

Any suggestions?

thanx!

My lab (in The Scripp Institute) is using Gencarrier-1 reagent for routine cell tranfection.
Like most of you, we have been using lipo2000, fugene-6, GenePORTER reagents for a long time (before switch to Gencarrier-1). We have found that gencarrier-1 with the lowest price and lowest toxicity while showed consistent higher efficiency on COS, HeLa, CHO, 3T3, C2C12 and 293 cells.

I have good luck with gencarrier-1 on primary human keratinocytes and pancreatic cells. It is the cheapest and effective one I know on market.
Lipofectamine2000 is cytotoxic when longer exposure, you need to be very careful on your incubation.

Thanks PostDoc2130 for the GenCarrier-1 lead ... will give it a try :-)