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Could the problem of cell line contamination soon be coming to an end? Although contaminated cell lines have been reported in the scientific literature since the 1960s, the challenge for the research community has always been figuring out the best way to stem the tide of these misidentified or contaminated cells. What is the best procedure to authenticate the cell lines used in research articles, grants, and cell banks? And when should authentication be required rather than only suggested?
Answers to some of these questions appear to be on the horizon: the ATCC has formed a committee tasked with evaluating various authentication approaches, which will be announcing their findings, along with proposed authentication guidelines, at the end of 2011. (For more on this effort and on cell line validation in general, see this month's Tech News article by Jeffrey Perkel.) With a uniform set of authentication standards in place, a significant hurdle towards implementing ‘best practices’ in cell line usage for research articles and grant applications will have been removed.
With this in mind, the editorial staff at BioTechniques will begin requiring all cell lines used in any manuscript submitted to BioTechniques be validated starting in January 2012. Our new requirements for cell line authentication will be based in part on the suggestions given by the ATCC and its committee. Although this move will place additional financial and time burdens on our authors, the process of validating all the cell lines used in every BioTechniques article in the future will benefit not only our readers, who can be more confident in the results and new methods being described, but also our authors, whose research and conclusions will even better withstand possible challenge or critique.
Several people have suggested that funding agencies should step up to the plate at this stage and provide additional funding to support grantees in their authentication efforts. While this would represent an additional cost in a time of smaller budgets, the overall amount necessary should not be very high. Providing this money as a component of a researcher's grant could significantly decrease the numbers of mischaracterized cell line, thereby reducing the financial and time cost to all involved.
In the end, decreasing the number of misidentified cell lines will take a concerted effort from various groups. Journal publishers will need to require identification data for the cell lines presented in the articles they decide to publish, cell banks should require some level of validation information prior to banking (as well as perform additional, comprehensive validation studies themselves prior to distributing cell lines), and finally, funding agencies must financially support validation efforts and require grant submission be accompanied by cell line validation data. With BioTechniques’ first step starting in January 2012, we hope that both our authors and readers appreciate the rationale behind making this move now. During November and December, you will see a new Instruction to Authors in the pages of this journal and on our web site explaining the new authentication requirements for cell lines used in BioTechniques publications. If you have any questions or comments—either now or after the announcement of our requirements—please feel free to contact us. And as always, share your thoughts by posting at our Molecular Biology Forums under “To the Editor” (http://molecularbiology.forums.biotechniques.com) or sending an email directly to the editors (bioeditor@biotechniques.com).
