Speedier Genome-wide Screening at Cancer Research UK

TTP LabTech recently announced that Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has purchased an Acumen eX3 microplate cytometer to run an RNAi whole genome screen to identify cytotoxic survival regulators.
The Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute (LRI) has recently established a High-Throughput Screening facility to enable its research groups to easily access genome-wide siRNA and RNAi screening technologies. The LRI facility needs equipment that is robust, capable of high throughput and very flexible to accommodate all of the possible interests of the research groups.
The Acumen eX3 will be used to complement the existing infrastructure of automated microscopes, but will also be used as an investigative tool in its own right.
The high throughputs achieved by the Acumen eX3 means that to screen the whole genome will take days, compared to the same screen taking at least 2 years on a flow-based instrument. It can read an entire 384-well plate in under 10 minutes, and this includes multiplexing the assay with other biomarkers. A recent study (Kittler, R et al., Nature Cell Biology. 2007; 9: 1401-1412) looking at genome-scale RNAi
profiling of cell division in human tissue culture cells was screened on an Acumen microplate cytometer. The siRNA library targeted 17,828 genes, and identified 252 previously uncharacterized genes as being involved in the regulation of the cell cycle.