Use of Cause-and-Effect Analysis to Design a High-Quality Nanocytotoxicology Assay

An important consideration in developing standards and regulations that govern the production and use of commercial nanoscale materials is the development of robust and reliable measurements to monitor the potential adverse biological effects of such products. These measurements typically require cell-based and other biological assays that provide an assessment of the risks associated with the nanomaterial of interest. In this perspective, we describe the use of cause-and-effect (C&E) analysis to design robust, high quality cell-based assays to test nanoparticle-related cytotoxicity. C&E analysis of an assay system identifies the sources of variability that influence the test result. These sources can then be used to design control experiments that aid in establishing the validity of a test result. We demonstrate the application of C&E analysis to the commonly used 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-5-(3-carboxymethoxyphenyl)-2-(4-sulfophenyl)-2H-tetrazolium (MTS) cell-viability assay. This is the first time to our knowledge that C&E analysis has been used to characterize a cell-based toxicity assay. We propose the use of a 96-well plate layout which incorporates a range of control experiments to assess multiple factors such as nanomaterial interference, pipetting accuracy, cell seeding density, and instrument performance, and demonstrate the performance of the assay using the plate layout in a case study. While the plate layout was formulated specifically for the MTS assay, it is applicable to other cytotoxicity, ecotoxicity (i.e., bacteria toxicity), and nanotoxicity assays after assay-specific modifications.