Transfection of molecular beacons in microchannels under flow and no-flow conditions

In this work, transfection of molecular beacons in traditional cell culture dishes and microfluidic cell culture systems with or without flows were comparatively studied by both computational and experimental methods. The comparison between static microfluidic systems and cell culture dishes reveals that the transfection of molecular beacons is controlled by both diffusion and reaction. The study on the microfluidic system with a range of fluid shear stresses and mass transfer rates implies that under high levels of shear stress the disruption of the binding between transfection reagent/molecular beacon complexes and cell membrane is dominant over the enhanced mass transfer.