siRNA kit - expensive (Sep/24/2005 )

The siRNA kit from Qiagen is so expensive !!!

My boss wishes to use siRNA but he does not have the money. He was disappointed when I told him the price for the kit.

If I got a PhD scholarship, I may be able to donate the scholarship to fund the siRNA study. Unfortunately I am just a self-funded PhD student and it will be hard for me to donate my saving (for paying the parking fee and petrol so that I can come to work at 6-7am and left at 8-9pm).

Do anyone know how to perform siRNA without using the expensive kit?

Thank you

Hello,

I don't know what kit from Qiagen you are referring to and what are included.

There are at least 3 ways of making siRNA for transfection.

• Chemically synthetic siRNA - around $300 for each siRNA duplex, time-saving, reliable
• Hairpin siRNA which is cloned from DNA oligos - You need to buy the vector, oligos, do ligation, transformation, screening, plasmid preparation etc, error prone, time consuming
• PCR expression cassette - seems to be the most economic way of producing siRNA, but the quality of such siRNA may be not as good as synthetic siRNA.

Thank You