A multidisciplinary research team from the State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI and the Institute of Microelectronics at the University of Macau has recently proposed a new method for joint assessment of cell health, which can effectively and precisely assess cell health status by constructing a temperature-regulated electrical impedance sensing system to precisely measure cell viability and vitality. The research results were published in ACS Sensors, an international journal of the American Chemical Society in the field of sensors, and selected as the supplemental cover of the journal.
The assessment of cellular health status is essential for drug screening and cell physiological activity studies. Existing methods of cell health assessment are only used to study cell viability or vitality, resulting in incomplete assessments. The laboratory team reported an integrated assessment of cell survival rate and proliferation activity based on the electric cell-substrate impedance sensing (ECIS) with temperature variation. The method directly measures the cell proliferation vitality by analyzing the impedance changes of cells under temperature-tolerant stress conditions, solving the problem that the conventional ECIS method can only measure cell viability. In addition, compared with the traditional trypan blue staining method, MTT method, and direct impedance sensing method, the temperature-regulated ECIS method not only realizes the joint assessment of cell viability and vitality, but also solves the problem that the results of cell health assay are easily affected by the initial cell number. The results are less dependent on the sample conditions, paving the way for constructing an on-chip cell health assessment system.
This multidisciplinary study is entitled “Temperature tolerance electric cell-substrate impedance sensing (ECIS) for joint assessment of cell viability and vitality”, with Ning Yang, Professor at Jiangsu University and Visiting Scholar at the State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI, as the first author and Yanwei Jia, Assistant Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI, as the corresponding author. In addition, this technical development was supported by the Macao Science and Technology Development Fund.
