Liquid crystal based sensors monitoring lipase activity: A new rapid and sensitive method for cytotoxicity assays

• Liquid crystals and lipids form a sensoric interface to study lipases.
• Lipases are released after necrosis, initiated by different cytotoxins.
• Lipase release after physical and chemical treatment of cells could be detected.
• Response time was faster than that of state of the art techniques.

In this work we present liquid crystal (LC) based sensor devices to monitor cell viability. The sensing layer is composed by the LC and a planar monolayer of phospholipids. In the presence of minute traces of phospholipases, which hydrolyze enzymatically phospholipids, the LC–lipid interface is disintegrated. This event causes a change in orientation of the LC, which was followed in a polarized microscope. The lipase activity can be used to measure the cell viability, since members of this enzyme family are released by cells, as they undergo necrosis. The described sensor was used to monitor the presence of the lipases released from three different cell lines, which were either exposed to highly cytotoxic model compounds (sodium azide and paracetamol) or subjected to freeze-thaw cycles to induce cell death by a non-chemical based inducer for apoptosis, such as temperature. Finally, the comparison of lipase activity detected by a state-of-the-art fluorescence assay to the LC based system resulted in the superiority of the LC system concerning incubation time and sensitivity.