I have heard worked with assays such as the MTT assay to measure cell viability, and heard of caspase assay kits to measure apoptotic activity. Yet what other methods and assays exist to measure cell health? Preferably these assays work on live cells in either a cell culture flask or in a 96-well plate.
You could do a simple cell count of trypan blue excluding cells (i.e. live cells), to determine cell doubling time.
Thanks for the suggestion. However, I know that trypan blue analysis kills cells which are extracted for counting and requires manual counting with hemocytometer. Are there other methods to measure cell health in culture, which preferably keep live cells live and interfere less with the cells in culture?
You could investigate the Alamar Blue assay. Cells can continue growing during this assay.
Is it possible for multiple assays to be run on a set of cells in a 96 well plate? In other words, would it be possible for me to run one of the assays, then wash the cells and perform a second assay? Or would it be better to only use one assay to measure cell health, since multiple cell health assays might all lead to about the same conclusion about cell health?
You can run multiple assays, but typically not on the same plate of cells. Make 2 or more replicate plates of cells, and then run separate assays on each plate.
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