Figure 3

Morphological and intracellular miR-122 accumulation assay. A: SEM image of HepG2 cells incubated with 10 mg/L GGMPN (a), or without treatment (b) for 1 h (Scale bar =3 μm). B: GGMPN delivered miR-122 into resistant HepG2 cells as imaged through laser confocal fluorescence microscopy; a-c) untreated cells, d-f) cells transfected with red fluorescent-modified miR-122 (1 mg/L, same concentration as loaded on GGMPN), g-i) cells combined with 10 mg/L GGMPN-loading red fluorescent-modified miR-122 (Scale bar = 50 μm). C: Quantitative assay of GGMPN on cell membrane permeability based on the CytoTox 96 assays; 1) untreated control, 2) resistant HepG2 cells transfected with miR-122 (1 mg/L, same concentration as loaded on GGMPN), 3) resistant HepG2 cells incubated with 10 m/L GGMPN. D: MTT assay for evaluation of the growth of cells treated with GGMPN. HepG2 cells were treated with 0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000, or 10000 mg/L of GGMPN. *P < 0.05 indicates a significant difference in comparison to untreated control. E: DNA fragmentation of HepG2 cells after different treatments. Genomic DNA was isolated from HepG2 cells, which were treated as follows: 5 mg/L GGMPN (lane 1), 2 mg/L GGMPN (lane 2), or 10 mg/L GGMPN (lane 3); DNA marker (M).