Cell counting is a mundane task, but it is fundamental for any biologist who works with cells. Cell counting is essential for cell culture—seeding cells at appropriate densities, monitoring cell health and proliferation, and facilitating proper passaging. It is also vital for numerous other in vitro experiments—for assessing immortalization, transformation, transfection, or infection efficacy, for determining how a treatment affects a cell population, and for dictating reagent or treatment concentrations to prevent artificial discrepancies in response magnitude. For all of these reasons, researchers need to perform cell counting accurately, consistently, and quickly.1
Manual cell counting is still very common in life science laboratories. Researchers typically load a small aliquot of a cell suspension onto a hemocytometer—a special optical glass slide containing a laser-etched grid.2 The operator then visualizes the cells under light microscopy, manually counts the number of cells within a certain area, and extrapolates that number to calculate the ...
