One piece of advice you will get from our Technical Services and R&D Scientists with regard to cell-based assays is to pay attention to what you are doing. Sounds obvious, but sloppiness can easily enter into the equation. Do you always count your viable cells with a hemocytometer and trypan blue exclusion before you split a culture? Do you always make sure that each well of your plate or plates contain the same number of cells? Two of our scientists, Terry Riss and Rich Moravec, published a paper demonstrating how decisions you make in experimental setup can ultimately affect the results you obtain. A natural consequence of this is difficulty replicating experiments if you didn’t pay attention to the details during the initial experimental setup.

Cell Density Per Well Affects Response to Treatment
To demonstrate how cell density can affect your data, Riss and Moravec set up parallel plates with three different cell densities of HepG2 cells and measured the response to tamoxifen. The lower the cell density per well, the more pronounced the effect of the tamoxifin on the cells. Higher density cells were more resistant to tamoxifen. Continue reading “Take Notes and Graduate Faster!”