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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Mar 1.
Published in final edited form as: Biomaterials. 2015 Nov 12;81:46–57. doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2015.11.023

FIGURE 3.

FIGURE 3

Characterization of the Heat-Inducible Plasmid. A) Schematic depicting the sTRAIL-EGFP plasmid (i), which expresses a sTRAIL-EGFP fusion that is constitutively activate, and the HSP-sTRAIL plasmid (ii), which expresses the same sTRAIL-EGFP fusion under the control of a heat-inducible HSP70B’ promoter. B) RT-PCR demonstrating the successful synthesis of the sTRAIL-EGFP plasmid, which was transfected into A2780 ovarian cancer cells. C) Proof-of-concept demonstrating that the HSP-sTRAIL plasmid can be specifically activated by heat (1 hour at 41°C in a water bath) as seen via fluorescence imaging due to fusion of TRAIL with EGFP. Scale bar = 50 µm. D) Confirmation of heat-specific TRAIL activation was obtained using qPCR (*p < 0.05) and was normalized to transfected cells that were incubated at 37°C. GAPDH was used as the housekeeping gene.