High-Throughput Screening (HTS) is widely used in pharmaceutical industry, basic and translational research to discover new chemical compounds and study biological processes. HTS relies on robotic automation, liquid handling devices and bioinformatics for data analysis to simultaneously process a very large number of cell-based tests. Such automated cell-based screenings can be used to test various nucleic acids, multiple cell variants or culture conditions and treatments, at large or very large scale, in order to rapidly generate results on cell banks or biologics and chemical libraries.

Applications and Methods of High-Throughput Screening

High-throughput screening bioassays are almost exclusively conducted in the microtiter plate format (96, 384 or 1536 wells) which is the standard format of miniaturization. HTS allow researchers to use advanced systems such as cell culture microplate incubators, automated liquid handling devices and fluorescence or absorbance plate readers to 1) grow cells in appropriate and controlled culture conditions, 2) transfect cells and run the designed experiments and 3) acquire the output results in an automated manner.

DNA High-Throughput Screening

High-throughput cDNA libraries screening is a valuable tool to study the structure, expression and regulation of genes in cultured cells, but also to study protein interactions and functions. jetPEI® is a transfection reagent ensuring very reproducible results, hence being particularly well suited for automated or manual HTS using DNA. Three jetPEI® protocols are available: reverse, batch and forward.

siRNA High-Throughput Screening

High-throughput RNA interference screening has emerged as a method of choice to setup genome-scale gain/loss of function screenings in cultured cells. INTERFERin® is a siRNA transfection reagent that can be used for high throughput screening applications providing great silencing efficiency, excellent reproducibility and high cell viability with very low amounts of reagent.