Systems microscopy to unravel cellular stress response signalling in drug induced liver injury

Wink, Steven (2015)

Doctoral Thesis

Toxicological insults are met by cellular adaptive stress response pathway activation. We find that activation of adaptive stress responses occur well before the typical ultimate outcome of chemical cell injury. To increase our understanding of chemically-induced adaptive stress response pathway activation and its contribution to safety assessment we believe that a time-resolved, sensitive and multiplex readout of chemical-induced toxicological relevant cellular stress responses will be essential. For that purpose, we developed a platform containing a panel of distinct adaptive stress response reporter cell lines. These are used for automated high content live cell imaging and quantitative multi-parameter image analysis to elucidate critical adaptive stress response pathway activation that can contribute to human chemical safety assessment. To conserve the endogenous gene regulatory programs, we tag selected reporter target genes with GFP using BAC-transgenomics approaches. In this thesis we demonstrate the functionality of individual BAC-GFP pathway in toxicity reporter cell lines. The application of these reporters in chemical safety assessment in relation to drug-induced liver injury is discussed in detail. We anticipate that ultimately a phenotypic adaptive stress response profiling platform will allow a high throughput and time-resolved classification of chemical-induced stress responses assisting in the safety assessment of chemicals.

• Imaging informatics
• High content imaging
• Adaptive stress response pathways

• All authors: Wink, Steven
• Supervisor: de Water, B. van
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Faculty of Science, Leiden University
• Date: 2015-12-22
• ISBN (print): 9789462039636