To Live or Let Die

Monday June 11, 2007

MTT assays are used to determine the viability, proliferation, or cytotoxic effect of a drug or other agent on cell lines. These assays are simple and easy to use and do not utilize radioactivity or manual cell counting to determine the number of viable cells present. This assay causes a color change in the tissue culture media due to the mitochondrial dehydrogenase of viable cells cleaving the MTT tetrazolium ring to produce purple crystals. Once these crystals are dissolved, the purple color is measured by a spectrophotometer and the color darkness is directly proportional to the number of viable cells present. These assays can be utilized in a number of ways to suit your research needs. You can determine the proliferation rate of certain chemicals to include growth factors or nutrients. At the same time you can determine if a certain drug or toxin is cytotoxic to the cell line of interest. These assays can determine whether a certain compound protects cells from a cytotoxic effect and could potentially be a building block to discovering a beneficial drug. Several assays are described below. In order to determine the best one for your research make sure to determine what equipment or supplies are required but not supplied in order to use the assay. For example, will you need a spectrophotometer or fluorescence/luminescence microplate reader? Also, determine the length of time the assay takes since many require incubation of the reagent with your cells for varying lengths of time. Another thing to consider is the price of the kit and total number of assays that can be performed. The MTT assay has been proven to produce reliable data over the years; the hard part is determining the company that provides the best assay for your needs. The products shown below are compared side by side for your convenience; one is sure to satisfy all your requirements.

Jamie Fritz
Research Assistant
Conceptual MindWorks, Inc.

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Company	Millipore (CHEMICON / Upstate / Linco)	Molecular Probes (Invitrogen)	Roche Applied Science	Sigma-Aldrich
Item	Cell viability Colorimetric Assay Kit	Cell Proliferation Colorimetric Assay Kit, Vybrant®	Cell Proliferation Colorimetric Assay Kit	Cell toxicity Colorimetric Assay Kit
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Description	MTT is a pale yellow substrate that is cleaved by living cells to yield a dark blue formazan product. This process requires active mitochondria, and even freshly dead cells do not cleave significant amounts of MTT... more	Our convenient Vybrant MTT Cell Proliferation Assay Kit simplifies the task of counting cells. MTT is an established reagent that is widely used to determine cell number in a variety of applications... more	Colorimetric assay (MTT based) for the nonradioactive quantification of cellular proliferation, viability, and cytotoxicity Application The Cell Proliferation Kit I (MTT)... more	This kit is designed for determining cell number spectrophotometrically as a function of mitochondrial activity in living cells. Traditionally, the in vitro determination of toxic effects of unknown compounds have been performed by counting viable cells after staining with a vital dye... more
Catalog Number	CT02	V13154	11465007001	TOX1
Quantity	1000 T/1000 assays	1 kit~1000 assays.	1 kit (2,500 tests)	1000 tests per kit
Method	Colorimetric	Colorimetric	Colorimetric	Colorimetric at 570 nm
Category	MTT Viability/Proliferation/Cytotoxicity Assays	MTT Viability/Proliferation/Cytotoxicity Assays	MTT Viability/Proliferation/Cytotoxicity Assays	MTT Viability/Proliferation/Cytotoxicity Assays
Detection Target	Cell viability	Cell Proliferation	Cell Proliferation	Cell toxicity
Detection	Request Info	Request Info	Request Info	Absorbance of converted dye is measured at a wavelength of 570 nm.
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