Dual Autophagy Apoptosis Assay: Breast cancer cells were treated with either a vehicle control (left picture) or the proteosome inhibitor 1 µM MG132 (middle picture) for 24 hours. The cells were dual stained for LC3 aggregation (green fluorescence), which measures autophagic vesicles, or N-terminal BAK (red fluorescence) which measures commitment to apoptosis. The relationship between the early commitment phase to apoptosis and autophagy can be fully explored using 2D scatter plots (right panel). In this example, autophagy is on the x-axis and apoptosis on the y-axis with two different cell populations coded blue and green.

Dual Autophagy Apoptosis Assay

While the importance of apoptosis in cell removal has been well understood for nearly two decades, the important role that autophagy also plays in this process has only recently been appreciated. Therefore like apoptosis, the modulation autophagy represents a new important therapeutic target. The beauty of our screen is it allows researchers to explore these two important processes in the same cells giving you much more information about how your lead series is modulating programmed cell death.