Calcium assay kit

Enzo Life Sciences has introduced a new assay kit for monitoring calcium mobilization in live cells. The FluoForte Calcium Assay Kit can measure calcium changes in challenging cell lines and with difficult receptors, generating a strong green fluorescence signal. The homogeneous assay can be used for analyzing G protein-coupled receptor and calcium ion channel targets. It does not require a wash step or the addition of a quencher dye, which could potentially modify pharmacological parameters. The FluoForte dye can be loaded at 37 °C or room temperature, and thus can be used for high throughput screening applications in drug discovery. The kit has been validated on a range of microplate-based readers as well as on flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy platforms. Starter and high-throughput kits are available or the dye is available as a stand-alone reagent. 



More information at www.enzolifesciences.com.

Image: Hela cells were seeded overnight at 40,000 cells per 100 µL per well in a 96-well black wall/clear bottom costar plate. The growth medium was removed, and the cells were incubated with 100 µl of 4 uM Fluo-3 AM, Fluo-4 AM or FluoForte AM in HHBS at 37 °C, 5% CO2 incubator for 1 hour. The cells were washed twice with 200 µl HHBS, ATP (20 µL/well) was added to achieve concentrations of 100 nM with dye efflux inhibitor, then immediately imaged with a fluorescence microscope (Zeiss) using FITC channel.