Lab 11 - High Throughput Screening

Bruce Edwards

 

The high throughput screening paradigm seeks biological discovery by physically screening tens to hundreds of thousands of compounds or bioassay variables.  We will introduce a novel high throughput flow cytometry approach that fills the sample uptake line with a stream of discrete sample particle suspensions, each typically a ~2 ul volume aspirated from one of the source assay wells of a microplate. The entire sample stream is continuously delivered to the flow cytometer so that data from all the samples in a 96-well plate are acquired and stored in a single data file in less than 3 minutes.  Students will set up instruments and microplate assays for data acquisition and become familiar with software analysis tools for extracting data from the atypically configured data files that result.   We will screen 96-well plates to identify "hits", wells with significant bioassay activity.