After plasmid transfection is there any detection method that could be used to detect the trasnfected plasmids at sinlge particle resolution? or at least which detection method would be the most sensitive? The plasmid woud be around 13 Kb and the organism Hela cells.
Are you hoping to count molecules of plasmid in single cells? I think transfection usually ends up loading thousands of copies into a cell - this should be detectable by qPCR. For fewer copies there's also digital PCR which has a lower detection limit
rather than counting them I was hoping to detect them in an micorscope image
While it is true that many plasmids enter the cell, it is only the ones that get into the nucleus that are the important ones. If you are going to try using microscopy, you will need to do high resolution confocal to make sure that you are only tracking the plasmids that are in the nucleus.
There is a paper where they tracked individual plasmids after electroporation. It might be useful for you:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23941812
It probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, but this could conceivably be done using atomic force microscopy. They do some of this at my university and it's always exciting to hear about. I've included an example paper though it's heavy on physics.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968432811001375
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