title: Are your results valid? Cellular authentication a need from the past, an emergency on the present.
abstract: The cultures of immortalized cells have been established in the 50s and become popular as a biological model for in vitro assays. The success and popularization brought side effects. Still, in the 60 years emerge the first cases of misidentification/contamination of cell line. Because of that, the scientific community has been oriented to authenticate their lines before performing assays. The use of cells with incorrect identification or contamination has been identified as responsible for an increasing number of unmatched results and a waste of resources. For this reason, we implemented the Cell Line Authentication Service at Brazilian Metrology Institute (Inmetro), open to Brazilian scientific community and society in general. From 2012 to 2014 were conducted 111 cell line authentication test, of which 13.8% had some problem. Here are the description and discussion of these data and simple guidelines to minimize the risk of contamination and misidentification, and invite the scientific community to maintain an alert system to avoid spending unnecessary resources and produce unreliable data.
authors.affiliation: Diretoria de Metrologia Aplicada às Ciências da Vida, Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia (INMETRO), Xerém, Brazil.
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Cosme
authors.affiliation: Diretoria de Metrologia Aplicada às Ciências da Vida, Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia (INMETRO), Xerém, Brazil.
authors.forename: Priscila
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Falagan-Lotsch
authors.affiliation: Diretoria de Metrologia Aplicada às Ciências da Vida, Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia (INMETRO), Xerém, Brazil.
authors.forename: Mariana
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ribeiro
authors.affiliation: Diretoria de Metrologia Aplicada às Ciências da Vida, Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia (INMETRO), Xerém, Brazil.
authors.forename: Kely
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Napoleão
authors.affiliation: Diretoria de Metrologia Aplicada às Ciências da Vida, Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia (INMETRO), Xerém, Brazil.
authors.forename: José Mauro
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Granjeiro
authors.affiliation: Diretoria de Metrologia Aplicada às Ciências da Vida, Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia (INMETRO), Xerém, Brazil. rsmouraneto@gmail.com.|Laboratório de Biologia Molecular Forense, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. rsmouraneto@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Rodrigo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Moura-Neto
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002460:Cell Line / Q000145:classification / Q000166:cytology*; D059018:DNA Contamination; D006801:Humans; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats / Q000235:genetics*
keywords: Cell line; Cell lineage; STR