Screening Whole

In the past few years, improvements in imaging and automation techniques have made it easy for researchers to see hundreds of plates of cells partake in every activity from differentiation to apoptosis. But in living and breathing animals, we’re only just beginning to realize the potential of large-scale screens. “To take a whole animal and be able to perform high-throughput screening—that’s a new thing,” says Alan Mayer, assistant professor of pediatrics and cell biology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. That’s worth the effort, he says, because you can do tests that you can’t do in cell culture, such as determining how changes in one gene can affect a living organism. What’s more, Mayer says, the techniques are a boon to animal physiology studies; a cell assay can tell you whether a drug is toxic, but only testing the drug in a living organism will show you how ...