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Live mammalian cell arrays

Nature Methods volume 10, pages 550–552 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

High-content assays have the potential to drastically increase throughput in cell biology and drug discovery, but handling and culturing large libraries of cells such as primary tumor or cancer cell lines requires expensive, dedicated robotic equipment. We developed a simple yet powerful method that uses contact spotting to generate high-density nanowell arrays of live mammalian cells for the culture and interrogation of cell libraries.

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Figure 1: A method to array live mammalian cells.
Figure 2: Applications of the arraying method.
Figure 3: Human mesenchymal stem cell array.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Hacker (Laboratory of Cellular Biotechnology, Institute of Bioengineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) for kindly providing GFP-expressing CHO and HEK cells, and V.M. Mangoua, A. Ranga and A. Negro for help with the project. The work was funded by a Marie Curie fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF 252457), by a SystemsX.ch Research, Technology and Development grant: DynamiX (2008/005), a Swiss National Science Foundation Pro-Doc grant (PDFMP3 137065), a European Young Investigator grant PE002-117115/1 to M.P.L. and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

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Author notes

  1. Kristina Woodruff and Luis M Fidalgo: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Bioengineering, School of Engineering and School of Life Science, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

    Kristina Woodruff, Luis M Fidalgo, Samy Gobaa, Matthias P Lutolf & Sebastian J Maerkl

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  1. Kristina Woodruff
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  2. Luis M Fidalgo
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  3. Samy Gobaa
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  4. Matthias P Lutolf
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  5. Sebastian J Maerkl
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Contributions

L.M.F., K.W., M.P.L. and S.J.M. designed experiments and developed the method. L.M.F. and K.W. performed experiments. S.G. assisted with cell culturing and image processing and provided transfection reagents. L.M.F., K.W., M.P.L. and S.J.M. wrote the paper. S.J.M. conceived the idea.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sebastian J Maerkl.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Woodruff, K., Fidalgo, L., Gobaa, S. et al. Live mammalian cell arrays. Nat Methods 10, 550–552 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2473

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