Resazurin is reduced to resorufin by aerobic respiration of metabolically active cells, and it can be used as an indicator of cell viability. It was first used to quantify bacterial content in milk by Pesch and Simmert in 1929. It can be used to detect the presence of viable cells in mammalian cell cultures. It was introduced commercially initially under Alamar Blue trademark (Trek Diagnostic Systems, Inc), and now also available under other names such as AB assay, Vybrant (Molecular Probes) and UptiBlue (Interchim).
Resazurin based assays show excellent correlation to reference viability assays such as formazan-based assays (MTT/XTT) and tritiated thymidine based techniques. The low toxicity makes it suitable for longer studies, and it has been applied for animal cells, bacteria, and fungi  for cell culture assays such as cell counting, cell survival, and cell proliferation. In antimicrobial assays, resazurin is commonly utilized to assess the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) or minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) of antimicrobial agents. 
To take the place of a standard live/dead assay, resazurin also be multiplexed with chemiluminescent assays, such as cytokine assays, caspase assays to measure apoptosis, or reporter assays to measure a gene or a protein expression.
The irreversible reaction of resazurin to resorufin is proportional to aerobic respiration.