Transfection: How long until translation starts? - (Dec/08/2009 )

Hello scientists

does anybody of you know how long the duration from cell transfection (HeLa, 6kb plasmid) until translation start is? its because we got very different results in luciferase activity between o/n incubation and 4h incubation, respectively, before adding antibiotics. we use Roche FuGene for transfection.

I don't know the full answer, but 4 hours seems rather short for this sort of thing, at that point there will still be lots of transfection reagent/DNA lipospheres floating around waiting to hit a cell, so there is likely to be less plasmid in the cell.

In our lab we check luciferase activity usually the next day after transfection or in some cases even a day later.