Quantitative Proteomic Analysis of Cell Responses to Electroporation, a Classical Gene Delivery Approach

Electroporation, as an established nonviral technology for breaching cell membrane, has been accepted for the delivery of nucleic acids. Despite satisfactory delivery efficiencies have been achieved on multiple cell kinds by simply exhausting all possible electrical parameters, electroporation is still inefficient, or even invalid, for various kinds of cells. This is largely due to the lack of comprehensive understanding of cell responses to electrical stimulation at biological aspect. Moreover, a systematically investigation of protein variation of electroporated cells is also required for biosafety evaluation before clinically applying electroporation. By employing quantitative proteomic analysis, the biological mechanism of electroporation is explored from the molecular level. The results reveal that electrical stimulations widely influence many biological processes including nucleic acid stabilization, protein synthesis, cytoskeleton dynamic, inflammation, and cell apoptosis. It is found that several antivirus-related processes appeared in the enrichment results. Moreover, SAMD9, a broad spectrum antiviral and antitumor factor, is dramatically downregulated on easy-to-transfect cells while electroporation can not alter SAMD9 expression on hard-to-transfect cells, hinting that electroporation, a pure physical treatment, can induce antivirus-like defensive responses and the altering of SAMD9 can be used to predict the effectiveness of electroporation on transfecting specific kinds of cells.