Which cell line is it anyway

A recent study has uncovered an astonishingly high level of misidentification of laboratory cell lines. Short tandem repeat (STR) profiling was used to examine 253 human cell lines and revealed that 36% were of a different type, or from a different species to that claimed. STR profiling is commonly used in forensic science and uses standard oligonucleotide primers to amplify polymorphic STR loci in the sample of interest. Automated analysis of the PCR products generates a numerical code specific for the sample. The authors suggest that STR profiling should provide the basis for an international reference standard for human cell lines and that all cell lines should be authenticated at the time they are being used [Masters J.R. et al. (2001) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 98, 8012–8017]. The misidentification of cell lines might have been extremely costly in terms of wasted time, effort and money. First author John Masters of University College London, UK, describes the situation as a ‘scandal’, and UK newspaper The Observer claims that breast cancer cells have been mistakenly used in liver cancer research and that some colon cancer research has been carried out using cell lines from cervical tumours. However, with the mandatory testing of cell lines, which costs about $200 per sample, this problem could quickly be minimized, assuring the quality of published data. S.L.