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A challenge facing the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries is the ability to quantitatively assess biomarker expression in living cells, which is necessary to evaluate and predict the influence of the extracellular environment on cell behavior and response. Responding to the needs of these industries, the group is developing a cell metrology toolkit that will help minimize sources of variability in conducting quantitative cell biology measurements, and facilitate inter-laboratory data comparability. These tools will facilitate applications such as diagnostic assays, development of biomaterials, determination of culture conditions for stem cells, drug screening and drug development, and validation and use of data from basic research on cells and tissues. Such reference materials and protocols will be essential for standardizing and validating data and modeling for understanding complex biological systems.
The toolkit contains materials and protocols for measuring and validating biomarker gene expression in living cells and includes:
• Materials and protocols for quantitative automated fluorescence microscopy and image analysis that facilitate measurements of statistically relevant numbers of cells in an unbiased fashion and enables reliable interlaboratory measurements;
• Validated fluorescent reporter-expressing cell lines that can serve as indicators of culture conditions; and
• Thin films of Type 1 collagen that provide rugged and reproducible matrices to aid reproducibility and enable quantitative microscopy.
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