www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/ Oncotarget, 2017, Vol. 8, (No. 25), pp: 40514-40532 Research Paper Quantification of cell cycle kinetics by EdU (5-ethynyl-2′- deoxyuridine)-coupled-fluorescence-intensity analysis Pedro D. Pereira1,*, Ana Serra-Caetano1,*, Marisa Cabrita2, Evguenia Bekman1, José Braga1, José Rino1, Renè Santus3, Paulo L. Filipe1, Ana E. Sousa1 and João A. Ferreira1 1Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Faculdade Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal 2Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford, OX3 7FY Oxford, United Kingdom 3Muséum National d´Histoire Naturelle, Département RDDM, 75231 Paris, France *These authors contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: João A. Ferreira, email:
[email protected] Keywords: cell cycle, EdU, S phase, DNA replication Received: May 20, 2016 Accepted: April 03, 2017 Published: April 15, 2017 Copyright: Pereira et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT We propose a novel single-deoxynucleoside-based assay that is easy to perform and provides accurate values for the absolute length (in units of time) of each of the cell cycle stages (G1, S and G2/M). This flow-cytometric assay takes advantage of the excellent stoichiometric properties of azide-fluorochrome detection of DNA substituted with 5-ethynyl-2′-deoxyuridine (EdU). We show that by pulsing cells with EdU for incremental periods of time maximal EdU-coupled fluorescence is reached when pulsing times match the length of S phase.