12
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      Investigation of the Alamar Blue (resazurin) fluorescent dye for the assessment of mammalian cell cytotoxicity : Resazurin as a cytotoxicity assay

      , , ,
      European Journal of Biochemistry
      Wiley-Blackwell

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          We show here the identity of Alamar Blue as resazurin. The 'resazurin reduction test' has been used for about 50 years to monitor bacterial and yeast contamination of milk, and also for assessing semen quality. Resazurin (blue and nonfluorescent) is reduced to resorufin (pink and highly fluorescent) which is further reduced to hydroresorufin (uncoloured and nonfluorescent). It is still not known how this reduction occurs, intracellularly via enzyme activity or in the medium as a chemical reaction, although the reduced fluorescent form of Alamar Blue was found in the cytoplasm and of living cells nucleus of dead cells. Recently, the dye has gained popularity as a very simple and versatile way of measuring cell proliferation and cytotoxicity. This dye presents numerous advantages over other cytotoxicity or proliferation tests but we observed several drawbacks to the routine use of Alamar Blue. Tests with several toxicants in different cell lines and rat primary hepatocytes have shown accumulation of the fluorescent product of Alamar Blue in the medium which could lead to an overestimation of cell population. Also, the extensive reduction of Alamar Blue by metabolically active cells led to a final nonfluorescent product, and hence an underestimation of cellular activity.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          European Journal of Biochemistry
          Wiley-Blackwell
          00142956
          September 2000
          September 03 2000
          : 267
          : 17
          : 5421-5426
          Article
          10.1046/j.1432-1327.2000.01606.x
          10951200
          a593e9c1-9ab9-4e58-8486-39f008744c10
          © 2000

          http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1

          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article