ABSTRACT
In this study, we investigated to what extent the stability and transduction capacity of polyplexed DNA can be improved by optimizing the condensing peptide sequence. We have synthesized a small library of cationic peptides, at which the lysine/arginine ratio and the cation charge were varied. All peptides were able to compact DNA, at which polyplexes of short lysine-rich sequences were considerably larger than those of elongated or arginine-rich peptides (GM102 and GM202). In addition, the arginine-rich peptides GM102 and GM202 rendered the polyplexes resistant to plasma incubation or DNase I-mediated digestion. While all peptides were found to improve the transfection efficiency in HepG2 cells, only the GM102- and GM202-derived polyplexes could be specifically targeted to HepG2 cells by incorporation of a ligand-derivatized YKAK(8)WK peptide. We propose that GM102 and GM202 combine the advantage of small condensing peptides to give small-sized polyplexes with the superior stability of condensing polymers, which makes GM102 and GM202 excellent candidates for future in vivo gene therapy studies.
