Cell Proliferation Kit I (MTT)

Features and Benefits

• Safe and easy: Eliminate radioactive isotopes, washing steps, and additional reagents.
• Accurate: The absorbance obtained strongly correlates to the cell number.
• Sensitive: Detect low cell numbers.
• Fast: Process a large number of samples using a multi-well ELISA reader.

The assay is based on the cleavage of the tetrazolium salt MTT in the presence of an electron-coupling reagent. The water-insoluble formazan salt produced must be solubilized in an additional step. Cells grown in a 96-well tissue culture plate are incubated with the MTT solution for approximately 4 hours. After this incubation period, a water-insoluble formazan dye is formed. After solubilization, the formazan dye is quantitated using a scanning multi-well spectrophotometer (ELISA reader). The measured absorbance directly correlates to the number of viable cells.
Cell proliferation and viability assays are of particular importance for routine applications in cell biology. Tetrazolium salts (e.g., MTT, XTT, WST-1) are particularly useful for this type of analysis. Tetrazolium salts are cleaved to formazan by the succinate-tetrazolium reductase system (EC 1.3.99.1) which belongs to the respiratory chain of the mitochondria, and is only active in metabolically intact cells (see below).