Studying pharmacodynamic effects in cell cultures by chemical fingerprinting − SIA electronic tongue versus 2D fluorescence soft sensor

Abstract

The viability of cells for drug screening purposes is usually tested with a variety of colorimetric/fluorescent methods In this work, two alternative ways of assessing toxic effect in cell cultures: sequential injection analysis (SIA) electronic tongue and soft-sensor based on 2D fluorescence have been evaluated and compared as novel, rapid techniques for cell culture monitoring. It is shown, that the proposed non-selective methods, which are based on sample fingerprinting, are capable of cytotoxic effect detection and incubation time estimation in a model experiment considering the treatment of various cell lines with a model drug − diclofenac. It affected the metabolic activity of the cells in a concentration- and time-dependent manner resulting in varying amounts of necrotic, early apoptotic and late apoptotic cells. These phenomena could have been revealed with the use of both non-selective analytical systems based on the extraction of useful information from sample fingerprints by multivariate data analysis procedures. This proves that the proposed methods can be used for fast and reliable cell culture monitoring which potentially can be also non-invasive.