Scientists at AstraZeneca chose Poly-D-Lysine plates for growing many of the cell lines used in their high throughput screening assays
Scientists at AstraZeneca's drug discovery facility in Loughborough, UK, have chosen BD Biosciences Poly-D-Lysine (PDL) plates for growing many of the cell lines used in their high throughput screening assays.
Ian Dale, team leader, high throughput screening, said: "We routinely screen our compound libraries against respiratory and inflammatory targets using cell-based approaches, measuring effects on properties such as intracellular calcium flux.
Some of the cell lines used are not very adherent and, when an assay includes several washing stages, there is the strong possibility that the cells will wash off the base of the well and give a false positive result if we use normal tissue culture treated plates.
We use PDL coated plates because the cells adhere to them much more strongly." "We could make the PDL plates ourselves but we run an enormous amount of assays and time is at a premium.
We need at least 160 plates a day (sufficient for 51,000 compounds) and it is so much more convenient to buy them, especially as we know from experience that BD Biocoat products are of a high quality with little batch-to-batch variation.
The service is good and BD Biosciences responds very quickly to our requirements, even when we need a large quantity of plates at short notice."
