Here’s the good news: The Spectrum Compact CE System is now available from Promega.
Here’s the better news: Labs of all sizes now have the opportunity to perform Sanger sequencing and fragment analysis with a personal, benchtop instrument.
There is no bad news.
Continue reading “Capillary Electrophoresis On Your Benchtop”
Scenario 1: Jake needs a flask of MCF-7 cells for an assay, so he sends an email to the graduate student listserv asking for cells. Melissa replies that she has an extra flask of cells that she could share. Jake happily accepts the cells and begins his experiment.
Scenario 2: Michael passaged his cells yesterday and, according to the protocol, was supposed to plate cells today for treatment. However, his previous experiments were delayed, so he decides to plate them tomorrow instead. The cells look healthy, so it should be ok.
What is wrong with the above scenarios? These actions may seem harmless, but they could be the cause of variability, leading to irreproducible results.
Continue reading “How to Reduce Cell Culture Variability”
If you work with cell lines you may have paid attention to the dramatic headline published last month in the online journal STAT, Thousands of studies used the wrong cells, and journals are doing nothing.” In their column The Watchdogs (“Keeping an eye on misconduct, fraud, and scientific integrity”), Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus call out the fact that scientists continue to publish research using cell lines that are contaminated or misidentified. Recent estimates have found that the percentage of misidentified cell lines used by scientists is as high as 20 to 36. The blame here is being placed on the peer reviewed journals for not blowing the whistle. The authors call for journals to put some “kind of disclaimer on the thousands of studies affected.”
This is not a new claim. The continuing problem of cell line misidentification, of lack of authentication, has been covered before in various channels. It’s easy to find news publicizing yet another retracted publication. In May 2015 the journal Nature required authors of all submitted manuscripts to confirm the identity of cell lines used in their studies and provide details about the source and testing of their cell lines.
Continue reading “The Cell Line Identity Crisis”
Researchers working with immortalized cell lines would readily agree when I state that it is almost impossible to look at cells under the microscope and identify them by name. There are phenotypic traits, however they do change with change in media composition, passage number and in response to growth factors. I remember the pretty arborizations my neuroblastoma cell line SH-SY5Y exhibited in response to nerve growth factor treatment. Thus physical appearance is not a distinguishing feature. Currently, in many labs, researchers typically use more than one cell line, and more than likely, share the same lab space to passage cells and the same incubator to grow the cells. In such scenarios, it is not difficult to imagine that cell lines might get mislabeled or cross-contaminated. For example HeLa cells, one of the fastest growing cell lines have been shown to invade and overtake other cell lines.
Misidentification of cell lines has deep and severe implications. A review of cell lines used to study esophageal adenocarcinoma found that a large number of the cell lines were actually derived from lung or gastric cancers. Unfortunately, by the time this error was discovered, data from these cell line studies were already being used for clinical trials and other advanced studies and publications. Moreover, the cell lines were being to screen and design and test specific cancer drugs which ended up in flawed clinical trials. Continue reading ““Fingerprinting” Your Cell Lines”
