Adipocyte cultures are a mainstay of metabolic disease research, yet loss-of-function studies in differentiating adipocytes is complicated by the refractoriness of lipid-containing adipocytes to standard siRNA transfections. Alternative methods, such as electroporation or adenovirus/lentivirus-based delivery systems are complex, expensive and often accompanied with unacceptable levels of cell death. To address this problem, we have tested two commercially available siRNA delivery systems in this study using a multi-parameter optimization approach. Our results identified a uniform siRNA transfection protocol that can be applied to human and mouse adipocyte cultures throughout the time course of differentiation, beginning with pre-differentiated cells and continuing up to lipid-accumulated differentiated adipocytes. Our findings allow for efficient transfection of human and mouse adipocyte cultures using standard and readily available methodologies, and should help significantly expand the scope of gene manipulation studies in these cell types.
Keywords: RNA interference; adipocytes; adipose tissue; cell biology; differentiation; gene expression; lipid droplets; siRNA; staining; transfection.