The proposed research project for summer 2022 was to investigate the effect of cotreating cells with HDAC inhibitors and sucrose on transfection efficiency. Initially, the plan was to treat the cells with various concentrations of sucrose and HDAC inhibitors for varying incubation periods, such as 24 hours, 48, or 72 hours, to determine an optimal combination for maximizing transfection effectiveness.
To investigate this effect, experiments testing the effect of entinostat, an HDAC inhibitor, and sucrose at 10 uM concentrations with 48 and 72 hour incubation periods were tested. However, the cotreatment with entinostat and sucrose showed similar transfection efficiency to treatment with entinostat alone and worse viability for both incubation periods. This suggested that cotreatment would not yield the desired multiplicative effect, so the research plan was changed to assess entinostat alone.
After the new direction was established, new experiments with the intention of determining an ideal concentration and incubation period of entinostat that maximized transfection efficiency and viability. This would occur by taking the collected data and plugging it into Matlab’s DOE, which would give the ideal concentration and incubation time based on the inputted data points. Unfortunately, not all the necessary data for DOE was collected due to delays in receiving needed materials, but this work will continue in the fall.
