Comparative Evaluation of Natural Killer Cell-mediated Cell Killing Assay Based on the Leakage of an Endogenous Enzyme or a Pre-loaded Fluorophore.

A cell-killing ability of natural killer (NK) cells has been evaluated by the leakage of marker molecules from target cells. Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and calcein are two major non-radioisotope markers used for the killing assay. The spontaneous death of NK cells during the killing-assay of cells is a major issue in the assay because it provides background signals to increase errors. In this study, the effect of the spontaneous death of NK cells on the killing assays based on LDH and the calcein method was comparatively evaluated. We found that the calcein method is much less sensitive to the spontaneous death of NK cells to enable an accurate evaluation of the cell killing.