Recent developments of the Cell Line Integrated Molecular Authentication Database

Motivation Cross-contamination of human and animal cell lines is a frequent event (1). For this reason, the results obtained with the same cell lines by different research groups are often not fully comparable (2,3), this leading to main reproducibility issues. The short tandem repeat (STR) profile has been proposed as a molecular method for cell line authentication (4). STR profile standard data sets for human cell lines were proposed by some of the leading cell banks worldwide which also have made the results of STR profiling of their cell lines available on-line. We have built the Cell Line Integrated Molecular Authentication Database (CLIMA) (5) as a reference portal where authentication data are made available to the scientific community. This prototype system, although already largely utilized by researchers from all over the world, presented some limitations and only included a limited amount of STR profiles. Here, we present its most recent developments and discuss about some current challenges towards a better identification system for human cell lines.