Optical imaging of luminescence for in vivoquantification of gene electrotransfer in mouse muscle and knee

BMC Biotechnology

Table 1 Comparison between local and i.p. injection of luciferin to induce luminescence after electrotransfer of a plasmid encoding luciferase into the knee joint or tibial cranial muscle

	Experiment 1 (n = 5)				Experiment 2 (n = 8)
	Knee 60 μg		Muscle 3 μg		Muscle 30 μg
	Local	i.p.	Local	i.p.	Local	i.p.
Luminescence Millions units/min	4.37 ± 1.40	1.18 ± 0.25	3.08 ± 1.81	0.74 ± 0.38	20.41 ± 5.62	4.86 ± 1.20
Ratio local/i.p.	3.46 ± 0.76		3.55 ± 0.96		3.91 ± 0.38
Correlation	r² = 0.817		r² = 0.929		r² = 0.980
local/i.p.	p = 0.0351		p = 0.0082		p < 0.0001

Values are mean ± SEM of the integrated values of luminescence in ROI of the muscle or of the knee. In the first experiment, 60 and 3 μg of luciferase-encoding plasmid were electrotransferred into one knee joint and one tibial cranial muscle respectively. Luminescence was measured with the CCD camera 3 days after electrotransfer. In the second experiment, 30 μg of plasmid were electrotransferred into both tibial cranial muscles and luminescence was measured 7 days later. For all the experiments, luciferin was injected either locally (50 μg in the knee, 100 μg in the muscle) or i.p. (2.5 mg).

ISSN: 1472-6750