Lipofectamine-mediated Transfection and Silencing in Adipocytes

For expression assays, 3T3‐L1 cells, human adipocytes, and HEK-293 AD cells, were transfected with the corresponding plasmid vectors at 2.5 µg/mL using a 7.5:1000 dilution of Lipofectamine 2000 (Invitrogen), and cultured for 48 h prior to the experiments. For silencing studies, cells were transfected with a 7.5:1000 dilution of Lipofetamine RNAiMAX (Invitrogen) and mouse Rab34 siRNA (Dharmacon), mouse UBA1 siRNA (Dharmacon), or control siRNA (Sigma-Aldrich) (scrambled-transfected cells) at 25 nmol/L. Then, cells were kept in culture for 72 h. At the end of the experiments, cells were processed for confocal microscopy and/or immunoblotting as indicated in the corresponding sections. In another set of experiments, cells were collected in radioimmunoprecipitation assay (RIPA) buffer and intracellular concentration of TGs was determined using Triglyceride Reagent (Sigma-Aldrich) and Amplex UltraRed Reagent (Invitrogen), while culture media were analyzed for free glycerol content using Amplex UltraRed Reagent (Invitrogen) and Free Glycerol Reagent (Sigma-Aldrich) as previously described [24 (link)].