Piecing the Puzzle Together: Using Multiple Assays to Better Understand What Is Happening with Your Cells

You often need several pieces of information to really understand what is happening within a cell or population of cells. If your cells are not proliferating, are they dying? Or, are you seeing cytostasis? If they are dying, what is the mechanism? Is it apoptosis or necrosis? If you are seeing apoptosis, what is the pathway: intrinsic or extrinsic?

If you are measuring expression of a reporter gene and you see a decrease in expression, is that decrease due to transfection inefficiencies, cytotoxicity, or true down regulation of your reporter gene?

To investigate these multiple parameters, you can run assays in parallel, but that requires more sample, and sample isn’t always abundant.

Multiplexing assays allows you to obtain information about multiple parameters or events (e.g., reporter gene expression and cell viability; caspase-3 activity and cell viability) from a single sample. Multiplexing saves sample, saves time and gives you a more complete picture of the biology that is happening with your experimental sample.

What information do you need about your cells to complete the picture?
What information do you need about your cells to complete the picture?

Multiplexing assay reagents to measure biomarkers in the same sample has often been considered an application only accomplished with antibodies or dyes and sophisticated detection instrumentation. However, Promega has developed microwell plate based assays for cells in culture that allow multiplexed detection of biomarkers in the same sample well using standard multimode multiwell plate readers. Continue reading “Piecing the Puzzle Together: Using Multiple Assays to Better Understand What Is Happening with Your Cells”

The 64 billion dollar question: Is my compound or treatment toxic?

CellTox™ Green Dye is excluded from viable cells, but it binds to DNA from cells with compromised membrane integrity.
CellTox™ Green Dye is excluded from viable cells, but it binds to DNA from cells with compromised membrane integrity.

Determining the exact cause/effect relationship between a treatment and a cellular outcome is not a simple matter, but is critical for really understanding how therapeutic treatments affect target cells or exercise any off-target effects.

Four key factors are critical for determining whether or not a particular treatment or compound is toxic.

  1. Dosage (usually addressed by a dilution series)
  2. Exposure time
  3. Mechanism of Action
  4. Cell Type

In a recent Promega Webinar, A Cytotoxicity Assay That Fits Your Timeline, Promega scientist Dr. Andrew Niles presented the CellTox™ Green Cytotoxicity Assay—a new tool that gives researchers more power to answer the question “Is my compound or treatment toxic?” Continue reading “The 64 billion dollar question: Is my compound or treatment toxic?”