High content screening applied to large-scale cell biology

High Content Screening (HCS) has been useful as an early drug-discovery platform for defining the functions of genes, proteins and other biomolecules in normal and abnormal cellular functions. The same concept of integrating and automating cell-sample preparation, fluorescent labeling, image acquisition, image processing, image analysis, information management and knowledge mining is now beginning to have an impact in basic biomedical research. These integrated tools allow an increase in the scale of cell biological investigations to large-scale cell biology and their value is demonstrated by the rapid performance of a kinetic, multiparameter cytotoxicity assay enabling generation of 10(8) individual physiological cellular measurements in less than one day.