Which products or brands would you recommend for performing miRNA luciferase assays to determine if an mRNA sequence is a direct target of the particular miRNA? Specifically relating to the miRNA mimics (Dharmacon/Qiagen etc), transfection reagent, and the luciferase kit.
Transfection reagent might depend on your target cell type. We've had excellent success with Invitrogen's RNAiMAX reagent (good transfection efficiency, low toxicity) on a variety of primary cells (HUVECs, hMSCs). I've used Dharmacon's miR mimetics and antagonists with good success (see PMID 22331826), but have no reason to think that Qiagen's product would not be equally efficacious. Use a luciferase reporter that has strong basal activity in your cell type of interest (i.e. driven by a constitutive promoter), and with a MCS at the 3' end such that you can insert your seed sequence in the 3' UTR.
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