BioCat offers a large variety of assays to measure cellular proliferation, cell viability, cytotoxicity and senescence for monitoring the response and health of cells in culture after treatment with various stimuli.
Cell proliferation rates or viability levels are good indicators of cell health. Proliferation or viability analysis is crucial for cell growth and differentiation studies, and is often coupled with metabolism analysis. Metabolic activity is commonly used as a viability indicator, but for some applications it can be important to assess viability independent of metabolic state.
Cell proliferation is also a convenient measure of population dynamics when studying cytokines or growth factors, or in bioprocess optimization work. On the other hand, assessing compound cytotoxicity is a critical step in pharmaceutical development. In oncological settings these assays are also used to evaluate both compound toxicity and inhibition of tumor cell growth during drug development.
The cell proliferation assays are designed to monitor cell proliferation rates with either colorimetric or fluorometric detection
Cell viability in a particular experiment can depend on diverse criteria ranging from redox potential of the cell population, the ATP/ADP levels, the integrity of cell membranes, to the activity of cellular enzymes such as LDH and esterases. Therefore, biomarkers that can be quantified include ATP, NADH, caspases, LDH, and live- and dead-cell proteases.
Cellular senescence assays provide efficient methods to measure Senescence Associated (SA) ß-galactosidase. SA-ß-Gal catalyzes the hydrolysis of X-gal, which produces a blue color in senescent cells. Visualize results with the cellular senescence staining kit, quantify senescence activity using a fluorescence plate reader, or measure senescence by flow cytometry or epifluorescence microscopy.