Counting colonies of clonogenic assays by using densitometric software

Abstract

Clonogenic assays are a useful tool to test whether a given cancer therapy can reduce the clonogenic survival of tumour cells. A colony is defined as a cluster of at least 50 cells which can often only be determined microscopically. The process of counting colonies is very extensive work and so we developed software that is able to count the colonies automatically from scanned flasks. This software is made freely available by us with a detailed description how to use and install the necessary features. © 2007 Niyazi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.