Chloroquine use in transfection!!! - (Oct/14/2011 )

Hello all,
I wanted to transfect the HEk cells with lentiviral vector.
Before addition of the transfection complex I forgot to treat the cells with chloroquine.
what is the purpose of chloroquine in transfection? Can anyone please tell me whether the transfection has taken place, as i forgot to add chloroquine?


Thanks in advance.

It seems that chloroquine greatly improves transfection efficiency (some report 2 fold increase, others more). I couldn't find how it works, it appears to not be known, but I didn't look very thoroughly and the only paper I found about it was from 1996. This only took me five minutes to find out with google so I'm sure you'll be able to find out more if you have a good look.

So yes, you may have had successful transfection.

Chloroquine is an inhibitor of the lysosomal degradation of the DNA which is taken up by the cells, so as leelee said, transfection should have been successful, albeit at a slightly lower level than if you would have added the chloroquine. In my normal transfections, I never add chloroquine and get high efficiencies nevertheless. Only when I'm making virus, I add it (although I must admit I never tested virus production without chloroquine).