Application of a non-hazardous vital dye for cell counting with automated cell counters

Recent advances in automated cell counters enable us to count cells more easily with consistency. However, the wide use of the traditional vital dye trypan blue (TB) raises environmental and health concerns due to its potential teratogenic effects. To avoid this chemical hazard, it is of importance to introduce an alternative non-hazardous vital dye that is compatible with automated cell counters. Erythrosin B (EB) is a vital dye that is impermeable to biological membranes and is used as a food additive. Similarly to TB, EB stains only nonviable cells with disintegrated membranes. However, EB is less popular than TB and is seldom used with automated cell counters. We found that cell counting accuracy with EB was comparable to that with TB. EB was found to be an effective dye for accurate counting of cells with different viabilities across three different automated cell counters. In contrast to TB, EB was less toxic to cultured HL-60 cells during the cell counting process. These results indicate that replacing TB with EB for use with automated cell counters will significantly reduce the hazardous risk while producing comparable results.