ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent helps prevent the loss of fluorescent signal due to photobleaching during live cell imaging. When dyes are illuminated, they can degrade (usually permanently), reducing the sample’s fluorescent intensity and leading to the creation of free radical singlet oxygen, an element that can further degrade neighboring dye molecules. ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent metabolizes this element, increasing the signal intensity and duration while keeping the background signal low. ProLong® Live reagent has little-to-no effect on cellular viability, proliferation, or other cellular functions in experiments up to 48 hours.

Features of ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent include:
• Photobleach protection in live cell experiments, for fluorophores such as GFP, RFP, Hoechst 33342, MitoTracker®, LysoTracker®, and CellTracker®dyes
• Little-to-no effect on cellular viability, proliferation, or other cellular functions
• Easy to use, just add to the imaging solution or complete cell culture media or buffer, incubate, and image

ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent contains enzymes from the plasma membrane of naturally occurring E. coli. These enzymes metabolize the elements that can cause photobleaching. They work in the extracellular space and are not known to enter cells, so intracellular functions are minimally affected by ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent. As shown in figure below, cells grown in the presence of ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent display minimal effects on cellular viability or proliferation. ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent provides photobleach protection for most fluorophores frequently used in live cell fluorescent imaging, such as GFP, RFP, Hoechst 33342, MitoTracker®, LysoTracker® and CellTracker® dyes. ProLong® Live Antifade Reagent can be added to any cell culture media or buffer that is suitable for fluorescent imaging.