What Is Cell Painting?
One of the most common HCS assays is Cell Painting [1]. Cell Painting is a morphological profiling assay that uses six fluorescent dyes to label eight different components of the cell like nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi, mitochondria, lysosomes, endosomes, as well as the cytoskeleton. It is capable of capturing thousands of metrics and features in imaged cells. Analyzing these images enables visual detection of the spatial relationship between organelles or morphological changes that occur in response to drug treatment.
Compared to specialized, conventional HCS assays which can take months or even years to develop, Cell Painting provides a ready-to-use solution for comprehensive and unbiased data capture and can be scaled to test up to hundreds of thousands of compounds. Cell Painting inexpensively combines multiple stains in a robust assay to reveal thousands of morphological features. Because Cell Painting is a standardized method used by many researchers, the data collected can be easily shared, combined and repurposed by different teams for various applications.
Thanks to its quick deployment, high throughput and richness of readout, Cell Painting is widely used in initial drug discovery screening studies, providing unbiased and diverse information about the effects of screened compounds on cells. Cell Painting has been used for elucidating the mechanism of action (MOA) [2] and bioactivity [3]. It is an attractive solution for toxicology, reducing the use of animals in testing [4]. Additionally, Cell Painting has been used in structure-activity relationships (SAR) studies to assess the biological activity of newly synthesized compounds and to build diversity sets for focused libraries [5].
JUMP-Cell Painting (JUMP-CP) Consortium, an organization supported by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC), has put together a large public data set to encourage the development of phenotypic drug discovery approaches. Ardigen is a JUMP-CP supporting partner and has contributed to supporting the goals of the consortium by developing the JUMP-CP Data Explorer tool.