Electrosprayed chitosan nanoparticles: facile and efcient approach for bacterial transformation

A rapid and efcient procedure for DNA transformation is a key prerequisite for successful cloning and genomic studies. While there are eforts to develop a facile method, so far obtained efciencies for alternative methods have been unsatisfactory (i.e. 105 –106 CFU/μg plasmid) compared with conventional method (up to 108 CFU/μg plasmid). In this work, for the frst time, we prepared chitosan/pDNA nanoparticles by electrospraying methods to improve transformation process. Electrospray method was used for chitosan/pDNA nanoparticles production to investigate the non-competent bacterial transformation efciency; besides, the efect of chitosan molecular weight, N/P ratio and nanoparticle size on non-competent bacterial transformation efciency was evaluated too. The results showed that transformation efciency increased with decreasing the molecular weight, N/P ratio and nanoparticles size. In addition, transformation efciency of 1.7 × 108 CFU/μg plasmid was obtained with chitosan molecular weight, N/P ratio and nanoparticles size values of 30 kDa, 1 and 125 nm. Chitosan/ pDNA electrosprayed nanoparticles were produced and the efect of molecular weight, N/P and size of nanoparticles on transformation efciency was evaluated. In total, we present a facile and rapid method for bacterial transformation, which has comparable efciency with the common method.