Evaluation of the “Cellscreen” system for proliferation studies on liver progenitor cells

Proliferation studies on mammalian cells have been disadvantaged by the limited availability of non-invasive assays as the majority of approaches are based on chemical treatment, sampling or staining of cells removed from culture. In this study, we utilised the Cellscreen system (Innovatis AG, Bielefeld, Germany), a non-invasive automated technique for measuring proliferation of adherent and suspension cells over time. We have evaluated the ability of the Cellscreen system to monitor and quantify growth of adherent liver progenitor cells over time and tested several applications, (i) serum reduction or (ii) treatment with a cytokine. Our results demonstrate that the Cellscreen system reproducibly documents pro- and anti-proliferative effects of cytokines and growth factors and quantifies changes by providing cell-doubling times for control and test cultures. However, we found that for the conversion of cell density values into absolute cell numbers different conversion factors, which better suit the individual growth phases, need to be established. Collectively, these findings reveal that the Cellscreen system is applicable for the determination of cell proliferation of adherent and suspension cells in response to a variety of (growth) factors. It minimises operator participation and thus enables more rapid and larger screens and, being non-invasive, permits multiple assays on the same culture of cells. Hence, this technique proves superior to the common proliferation assays opening up new dimensions of proliferation studies in cell biology.