The Preparation of Cells for High-Content Screening

Abstract

With the emergence of high-content screening (HCS), i.e., the automated imaging of cells to detect changes in cellular physiology, comes the need of the cell biologist to have and be able to accurately select the most appropriate cells and cellular markers on a large scale. This new era has opened the door for the large-scale automated analysis of cellular events such as the trafficking and translocation of proteins, cellular morphology, and colocalization of proteins within organelles, to name a few [1-3]. The new addition to this technology is that the individual scientist is now enabled to train his or her suite of technological robotic partners for the automation of the cell culture, the automation of the cellular assays on finely integrated instrument platforms, or for the automated analysis of the vast number of cellular images collected by HCS platforms, all to carry out detailed experimental protocols with high fidelity. This scenario, the change from the small laboratory bench to high-content/high-throughput screening (HCS/HTS) scales the throughput from a handful of microtiter plates to hundreds and thousands of microtiter plates full of compounds and requires new equipment, new methods of standardization and, equally important, new thinking to troubleshoot the issues that arise in scaling up cell biology to confidently quantify those cellular functions.