Preparations for Particle-Mediated Gene Transfer Using the Accell Gene Gun

Particle-mediated delivery involves coating materials onto the surface of dense sub-cellular sized (0.5–5 mm) particles and accelerating the particles to sufficient velocity to penetrate target cells. The technique was invented by Sanford and Wolf at Cornell University (1 ) to transfer DNA into intact plant cells (2 ), and was further developed into an effective process for producing genetically engineered crop plants by several groups (reviewed in 3 ). Subsequent work has shown that this method is generally applicable for transferring materials including DNA, RNA, proteins, peptides and pharmacological compounds into a wide variety of tissue and cell types in vivo, ex vivo, or in vitro (reviewed in 4 ).