To begin, maintain cells in a 75-square-centimeter culture flask. Aspirate the culture medium and rinse the cells with PBS without calcium and magnesium. Next, add two milliliters of 0.25%trypsin EDTA to detach adherence cells.
Incubate for five minutes at room temperature and resuspend the cells in 10 milliliters of medium. Next, collect the cells from the flask into a 15-milliliter centrifuge tube. Centrifuge at 480 G for five minutes at room temperature and aspirate the medium.
Resuspend the cells in 5 to 10 milliliters of medium based on the original confluency of the culture. Remove 100 microliters of cells and add to a 1.5-milliliter tube with 100 microliters of 0.4%trypan blue. Add the cells to the hemocytometer, and count them by observing under the microscope and using the manual tally counter.
Dilute the cells to three times 10 to the fourth cells per milliliter in the culture medium without phenol red. Add 2.5 milliliters of the cell suspension to each well of a six-well plate with poly-D-lysine-coated cover slip per the manufacturer's directions. Grow the cells overnight at 37 degrees Celsius and 5%carbon dioxide in a humidified incubator to enable cell attachment to the cover slip.
The next day, examine cell attachment under an inverted microscope using a 20X objective. Prepare the treatment stock solutions at the desired concentrations and create a media-only control, a vehicle-only control at a concentration that matches the test compound, and a control with the ionophore FCCP and the test compounds. Working with one cover slip at a time, add 1.8 milliliters of medium for the condition under the study to the cells.
Incubate the cells treated with either the control or test compound at 37 degrees Celsius and 5%carbon dioxide in a humidified environment for the desired time. Following the treatment period, add 200 microliters of 10X TMRE to the cells. Incubate for 15 to 30 minutes at 37 degrees Celsius in a 5%carbon dioxide humidified environment.
Gently aspirate the medium and rinse the cells two times with PBS to minimize background interference. Then invert the cover slip onto a microscope slide labeled with the treatment conditions. Image the cells live at 549 nanometers excitation and 575 nanometers emission.
Utilize a confocal microscope to capture several Z-stack fields with high-speed image capture before the cell integrity is lost. Save and store the image file for later analysis. The cells with active mitochondria retained TMRE staining and showed high fluorescence.
Depolarized or inactive mitochondria have reduced membrane potential, fail to retain TMRE, and show a low fluorescence signal.
