MV
Monica A Valentovic
  • Department of Biomedical Sciences, Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, Marshall University, 1700 Third Avenue, Huntington, USA
An Experimental Protocol for the Boyden Chamber Invasion Assay With Absorbance Readout
Boyden小室法侵袭实验的吸光度检测实验方案

The phenomenon of cell invasion is an essential step in angiogenesis, embryonic development, immune responses, and cancer metastasis. In the course of cancer progression, the ability of neoplastic cells to degrade the basement membrane and penetrate neighboring tissue (or blood vessels and lymph nodes) is an early event of the metastatic cascade. The Boyden chamber assay is one of the most prevalent methods implemented to measure the pro- or anti-invasive effects of drugs, investigate signaling pathways that modulate cell invasion, and characterize the role of extracellular matrix proteins in metastasis. However, the traditional protocol of the Boyden chamber assay has some technical challenges and limitations. One such challenge is that the endpoint of the assay involves photographing and counting stained cells (in multiple fields) on porous filters. This process is very arduous, requires multiple observers, and is very time-consuming. Our improved protocol for the Boyden chamber assay involves lysis of the dye-stained cells and reading the absorbance using an ELISA reader to mitigate this challenge. We believe that our improved Boyden chamber methodology offers a standardized, high-throughput format to evaluate the efficacy of various drugs and test compounds in influencing cellular invasion in normal and diseased states. We believe that our protocol will be useful for researchers working in the fields of immunology, vascular biology, drug discovery, cancer biology, and developmental biology.