Cell proliferation was assessed by comparing the results of an Alamar Blue assay and two DNA
quantification assays, CyQuant and PicoGreen, on two human cancer cell lines and two human
primary cell sources . It was found that the metabolic assays may not accurately reflect cellular proliferation rates due to a non-linear correlation between dye reduction and cell number that led to an over-estimation of cell number. Although the Alamar Blue assay is a simple, fast and sensitive assay it may not be as useful in assessing cell proliferation in these cell lines and, therefore, may be more valuable to cytotoxicity testing