Book contribution

June 23, 2016

Hellwig et al. contributed to Apoptosis Methods in Toxicology

FRET-based measurement of apoptotic caspase activities by high-throughput screening flow cytometry

Christian T. Hellwig, Agnieszka H. Ludwig-Galezowska, and Markus Rehm

 

in Apoptosis Methods in Toxicology, Humana Press/Springer; DOI 10.1007/978-01-4939-3588-8_7

 

Unwanted and excessive apoptosis contributes to various degenerative diseases, and apoptosis-inducing drugs are a mainstay of anti-cancer treatment regimens. The fields of pharmacology and toxicology consequently have a long history of investigating apoptotic cell death in the context of drug safety and efficacy studies. Canonical apoptotic cell death is crucially dependent on type II cysteinyl aspartate-specific proteases (caspases), and their activation is therefore widely used as a marker for this cell death modality. Here we describe a flow cytometric method for non-invasive, highly sensitive and reproducible FRET-based measurements of caspase activation. Compared to other flow cytometric techniques for apoptosis detection, this approach requires only minimal sample handling steps and provides a highly cost efficient option for large scale drug interaction studies and screens of compound libraries.

 

http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781493935864

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