The chemicals are probably either araC (cytosine arabinoside) or FUDR (5-fluoro-2'-deoxyuridine). Hopefully if you search with these terms, you can find a protocol suitable for your specific culture system.

It sounds like your process is not working well. Do you do tirturation good enough? What medium do you use? With proper technique you should have viable neurons, in addition to astrocytes, and then, after few DIVs, you should add Ara C of FUDR that will block further proliferation of astrocytes (but you will still have astrocytes that will promote the stability of your culture).

Hey Monica,

what promoter do you use on your lentiviral vector? In my experience, this is a critical point.  I used CMV that expresses poorly in my primary neurons and when I changed to a neuronal promoter I had around 80 % primary neurons infected, even with Glia cells in the background of your culture. Also the age of the culture is important. good luck! best, yvonne

Thanks to Shanshan, I searched arad and FUDR, it looks nice and I'll try arac first.

 also thanks to Julia and Boza, actually the culture part is OK, I get quite lots neurons, just after trahnsfection, neuron still there but glia show GFP(reporter for virus), so its a transduction problem.

For Yvonne, the promoter is CMV promoter, sounds neuronal promoter is better, which neuronal promoter did you use? I heart about syn and Ca2 seems works nice in neurons but haven't try them yet. 

Hi Monica,

I second Yvonne's suggestion of using a neuronal specific promoter. It makes a difference. I used before the Tubulins alpha1 promoter before with good results. You can find in Addgene a vector called pTalpha1-DsRed that you can use as template to PCR out the promoter to build up your lenti vector.Nevertheless, you should take the suggestions above regarding culture conditions since glia will uptake DNA more efficiently than neurons and can become a nightmare to find isolated infecting neurons or following their processes.

Good luck!