High-content Screening - History

History

High-content screening technology allows for the evaluation of multiple biochemical and morphological parameters in intact biological systems.

For cell-based approaches the utility of automated cell biology requires an examination of how automation and objective measurement can improve the experimentation and the understanding of disease. First, it removes the influence of the investigator in most, but not all, aspects of cell biology research and second it makes entirely new approaches to possible.

In review, classical 20th century cell biology used cell lines grown in culture where the experiments were measured using very similar to that described here, but there the investigator made the choice on what was measured and how. In the early 1990s, the development of CCD cameras (charge coupled device cameras) for research created the opportunity to measure features in pictures of cells- such as how much protein is in the nucleus, how much is outside. Sophisticated measurements soon followed using new fluorescent molecules, which are used to measure cell properties like second messenger concentrations or the pH of internal cell compartments. The wide use of the green fluorescent protein, a natural fluorescent protein molecule from jellyfish, then accelerated the trend toward cell imaging as a mainstream technology in cell biology. Despite these advances, the choice of which cell to image and which data to present and how to analyze it was still selected by the investigator.

By analogy, if one imagines a football field and dinner plates laid across it, instead of looking at all of them, the investigator would choose a handful near the score line and had to leave the rest. In this analogy the field is a tissue culture dish, the plates the cells growing on it. While this was a reasonable and pragmatic approach automation of the whole process and the analysis makes possible the analysis of the whole population of living cells, so the whole football field can be measured.