Cell Proliferation

Cell proliferation involves cell division leading to an increase in the cell population. In healthy organisms, there exists a balance between cell division and cell loss through its death or differentiation. In cancer however, there is a hallmark of dysregulated cell division leading to uncontrolled proliferation and increased tumor mass.

Cell proliferation assays have been developed to measure the effectiveness of anti-proliferative agents in vitro. Many of these assays have been developed for microplate usage and read with microplate readers. These include methods quantifying DNA synthesis (BrdU, EdU), metabolic activity (MTT, WST-1) and cellular ATP (luciferase-based luminescence). While widely used, they do suffer from liabilities, such as using an indirect method of quantifying proliferation and only allowing endpoint detection.

Given these limitations, label-free live cell imaging using direct cell counting has considerable advantages over typical endpoint, microplate reader-based methods or other kinetic imaging methods that require fluorescent labels. The High Contrast (HC) cell counting application uses modified brightfield imaging to generate a bright point of light for each cell that is easily identified and counted by Gen5™ software.