Quantitative Analysis of Whole-Mount Fluorescence-Stained Tumor Spheroids in Phenotypic Drug Screens

Abstract

Three-dimensional cell cultures, such as spheroids or organoids, serve as important models for drug screening purposes. Optical tissue clearing (OTC) enhances the visualization of fluorescence stainings and enables in toto microscopy of 3D cell culture models. Furthermore, subsequent automated image analysis tools convert qualitative confocal image sets into quantitative data. In this chapter, we describe a detailed protocol for preparation of HT29 cancer spheroids, 3D in toto immunostaining, glycerol-based OTC, whole-mount imaging, and semi-automated downstream image processing and segmentation for nuclear image analysis using open-source software.

Keywords: 3D cell culture; Image analysis; Open source; Optical tissue clearing; Organoids; Segmentation; Spheroid.