Introduction

Cell Painting is a multi-parameter image-based description of the cell response to any perturbator condition: treatment with a compounds, a siRNA, CRISPR engineering, … 

Treated cells are labelled with general fluorescent markers, and thousands of features are extracted by image analysis to build a profile, specific of a given perturbation. Assuming that similar perturbations lead to similar profiles, distance measurement between profiles is used to cluster compounds with similar impact on the cells. 

We have implemented Cell Painting workflow at Evotec to allow for the study of several thousands of compounds, using automated process for cell treatment and labelling, image analysis, data processing and quality control. 

We applied this workflow to the characterization of an internal compound collection, built with ~5,000 bioactive and annotated compounds. This work confirmed the power of Cell Painting approach to group compounds with similar MOAs and led to the selection of ~250 compounds to be used as a reference set in new studies. It also paved the way for further optimization, in particular to improve sensitivity of the technology.

_{1 Evotec (France) SE, 195 route d’Espagne, 31036 Toulouse Cedex, France}

_{2 Evotec (Germany) SE, Manfred Eigen Campus Essener Bogen 7, 22419 Hamburg, Germany}