Cell Culture Studies Fail to Provide Adequate Evidence for Their Claims

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I made an observation on MTT (or similar reduction) assays during my masters and PhD. Those assays were essentially measuring cellular metabolic activity (which is hardly a proper evidence for viability) but were utilized by researchers as a way to measure viability, cytotoxicity, proliferation rate and even cell death, without any change in experimental design. This initial observation led to an investigation for a nomenclature and a guide on cell culture practices, which was failed as there were none. The confusion was everywhere from ResearchGate questions by PhD students to papers published in high-impact journals. To provide a clarity and investigate the situation more systematically we wrote down clear and distinctive definitions for each term and then discussed (and decided on) best ways to measure them. We then investigated high-impact publications on cell culture to evaluate the methodology. Maybe not so surprisingly we detected numerous issues regarding the misinterpretation of assays. We published our findings in PLOS ONE. We hope that this study can raise some awareness on this topic and can be used as a mini-guide for cell culture practices.

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