Nobody publishes a paper about transfection efficiency. No one wins a grant for it. But every CRISPR experiment, every overexpression study, every viral vector production run depends on it. If your transfection hit 5% when you needed 30%, you just wasted a week of downstream work and thousands of dollars in reagents.

The cruel part: you often don't find out until days later, when the experiment fails for reasons that trace back to a bad transfection you never checked. The fix is trivially simple: image the plate, count the positive cells, compute the percentage. But "trivially simple" still takes time when you're scoring by eye across multiple wells, and it's worse when you need dual-positive rates for co-transfection.

Cytely gives you single-positive and double-positive percentages in minutes. Upload your DAPI + reporter images, gate on intensity, and you have a hard number. For dual plasmids, Cytely cross-gates both channels to tell you exactly how many cells got both constructs, the number that actually matters for your downstream experiment.

How the assay runs

Segment nuclei from DAPI → measure reporter channel intensity per cell → classify transfected/untransfected by intensity gating. For co-transfection: gate on each reporter channel to identify single- and multi-positive populations.

What you provide

  • Ch1: DAPI
  • Ch2: fluorescent reporter from plasmid A (e.g., GFP)
  • Ch3+: additional reporter channels (e.g., mCherry, BFP)

What you get

  • % transfected cells (single-positive, double-positive, or multi-positive)
  • Reporter intensity per cell
  • Total cell count

Ready to run

Single plasmid, multi-plasmid co-transfection (2+ constructs), viral transduction efficiency, any fluorescent reporter construct.

Inquire for support

Transient vs stable expression discrimination.

Explore the Transfection Efficiency assay →