title: The complete automation of cell culture: improvements for high-throughput and high-content screening.
abstract: Genomic approaches provide enormous amounts of raw data with regard to genetic variation, the diversity of RNA species, and protein complement. High-throughput (HT) and high-content (HC) cellular screens are ideally suited to contextualize the information gathered from other "omic" approaches into networks and can be used for the identification of therapeutic targets. Current methods used for HT-HC screens are laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human error. The authors thus developed an automated high-throughput system with an integrated fluorescent imager for HC screens called the AI.CELLHOST. The implementation of user-defined culturing and assay plate setup parameters allows parallel operation of multiple screens in diverse mammalian cell types. The authors demonstrate that such a system is able to successfully maintain different cell lines in culture for extended periods of time as well as significantly increasing throughput, accuracy, and reproducibility of HT and HC screens.
authors.affiliation: VUMC-Clinical Genetics, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. s.jain@vumc.nl
authors.forename: Shushant
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jain
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sondervan
authors.forename: Patrizia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rizzu
authors.forename: Zoltan
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Bochdanovits
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Caminada
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Heutink
mesh_terms: D057205:Automation, Laboratory; D018929:Cell Culture Techniques; D002460:Cell Line; D002470:Cell Survival; D023281:Genomics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D057166:High-Throughput Screening Assays; D006801:Humans; D057054:Molecular Imaging; D034622:RNA Interference; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software