SummaryThe first guidance on Good Cell Culture Practice (GCCP) dates back to 2005. This document expands this to include aspects of quality assurance for in vitro cell culture focusing on the increasingly diverse cell types and culture formats used in research, product development, testing and manufacture of biotechnology products and cell-based medicines. It provides a set of basic principles of best practice that can be used in training new personnel, reviewing and improving local procedures, and helping to assure standard practices and conditions for the comparison of data between laboratories and experimentation performed at different times. This includes recommendations for the documentation and reporting of culture conditions. It is intended as guidance to facilitate the generation of reliable data from cell culture systems, and is not intended to conflict with local or higher level legislation or regulatory requirements. It may not be possible to meet all recommendations in this guidance for practical, legal or other reasons. However, when it is necessary to divert from the principles of GCCP, the risk of decreasing the quality of work and the safety of laboratory staff should be addressed and any conclusions or alternative approaches justified. This workshop report is considered a first step toward a revised GCCP 2.0.

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Validation of antibiotic mode of action in whole bacterial cells is a key step for antibiotic drug discovery. In this study, one potential drug target, enoyl-acyl carrier protein reductase (FabI), an essential enzyme in the fatty acid biosynthesis pathway, was used to evaluate the feasibility of using a regulated antisense RNA interference approach to determine antibiotic mode of action. Antisense isogenic strains expressing antisense RNA to fabI were created using a tetracycline-regulated vector in Staphylococcus aureus. We demonstrated that down-regulation of FabI expression by induction of fabI antisense RNA induces a conditional lethal phenotype. In contrast, partial down-regulation gives a viable cell with a significant increase in sensitivity to FabI-specific inhibitors (i.e., a sensitized phenotype). More importantly, the mode of action for novel FabI inhibitors has been confirmed using this genetic approach in whole cell assay. These results indicate that controlled antisense technology provides a robust tool for defining and tracking the mode of action of novel antibacterial agents.

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