The complete automation of cell culture: improvements for high-throughput and high-content screening

Genomic approaches provide enormous amounts of raw data with regard to genetic variation, the diversity of RNA species, and protein complement. High-throughput (HT) and high-content (HC) cellular screens are ideally suited to contextualize the information gathered from other "omic" approaches into networks and can be used for the identification of therapeutic targets. Current methods used for HT-HC screens are laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human error. The authors thus developed an automated high-throughput system with an integrated fluorescent imager for HC screens called the AI.CELLHOST. The implementation of user-defined culturing and assay plate setup parameters allows parallel operation of multiple screens in diverse mammalian cell types. The authors demonstrate that such a system is able to successfully maintain different cell lines in culture for extended periods of time as well as significantly increasing throughput, accuracy, and reproducibility of HT and HC screens.