Tahara H, Matsuda S, Yamamoto Y, Yoshizawa H, Fujita M, Katsuoka Y, Kasahara T. High-content image analysis (HCIA) assay has the highest correlation with direct counting cell suspension compared to the ATP, WST-8 and Alamar blue assays for measurement of cytotoxicity.
J Pharmacol Toxicol Methods 2017;
88:92-99. [PMID:
28807796 DOI:
10.1016/j.vascn.2017.08.003]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/25/2017] [Revised: 07/24/2017] [Accepted: 08/08/2017] [Indexed: 01/21/2023]
Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Various cytotoxicity assays measuring indicators such as enzyme activity, dye uptake, or cellular ATP content are often performed using 96-well microplates. However, recent reports show that cytotoxicity assays such as the ATP assay and MTS assay underestimate cytotoxicity when compounds such as anti-cancer drugs or mutagens induce cell hypertrophy whilst increasing intracellular ATP content. Therefore, we attempted to evaluate the reliability of a high-content image analysis (HCIA) assay to count cell number in a 96-well microplate automatically without using a cell-number indicator.
METHODS
We compared cytotoxicity results of 25 compounds obtained from ATP, WST-8, Alamar blue, and HCIA assays with those directly measured using an automatic cell counter, and repeating individual experiments thrice.
RESULTS
The number of compounds showing low correlation in cell viability measured using cytotoxicity assays compared to automatic cell counting (r2<0.8, at least 2 of 3 experiments) were follows: ATP assay; 7; WST-8 assay, 2; Alamar blue assay, 3; HCIA cytotoxicity assay, 0. Compounds for which correlation was poor in 3 assays, except the HCIA assay, induced an increase in nuclear and cell size. However, correlation between cell viability measured by automatic cell counter and the HCIA assay was strong regardless of nuclear and cell size. Additionally, correlation coefficients between IC50 values obtained from automatic cell counter and from cytotoxicity assays were as follows: ATP assay, 0.80; WST-8 assay, 0.84; Alamar blue assay, 0.84; and HCIA assay, 0.98.
DISCUSSION
From the above, we showed that the HCIA cytotoxicity assay produces similar data to the automatic cell counter and is highly accurate in measuring cytotoxicity.
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