Each luminescent assay plate represents precious time, effort and resources. Did you know that there are three things about your detection instrument that can impact how much useful information you get from each plate? Instruments with poor sensitivity may cause you to miss low-level samples that could be the “hit” you are looking for. Instruments with a narrow detection range limit the accuracy or reproducibility you needed to repeat your work. Finally, instruments that let the signal from bright wells spill into adjacent wells allow crosstalk to occur and skew experimental results, costing you time and leading to failed or repeated experiments.
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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. 
Life is complicated. So is death. And when the cells in your multiwell plate die after compound treatment, it’s not enough to know that they died. You need to know how they died: apoptosis or necrosis? Or, have you really just reduced viability, rather than induced death? Is the cytotoxicity you see dose-dependent? If you look earlier during drug treatment of your cells, do you see markers of apoptosis? If you wait longer, do you observe necrosis? If you reduce the dosage of your test compound, is it still cytotoxic? 