flask or dish? - (Apr/05/2010 )

I am a beginner to cell culture and I was just wondering about the relative pros/cons of flasks and dishes for use in cell culture?
flasks seem to be best for preventing contamination, which is obviously a very important issue for me as my aseptic technique is not going to be the best starting out (being a beginner).
I am planning on doing a TRIzol RNA isolation with my cells so would a dish be easier to work with for this purpose?

I would appreciate any information! Thanks!


FYI, I am debating between T25 flask and 100 mm dish.

Hi!
When you use cell scrapers you are able to harvest your cells from the flask without problems.
I don't know if the cell scrapers we use in our lab have a spevial name, but they look like small windshiled wipers...

The only thing where I don't use flasks is the creation of stable clones because it's more convenient to pick colonies from a dish - although there are some methods to do this from flask bottoms, too.

Greetings,
Chakchel

Hi,

I regularly use T75 flasks to grow my cell lines and then seed them into 12 well plates or 60 mm dishes for experiments. I then add 1 ml of TRIzol to each well of a 12 well plate. However I have also added 1-2 ml TRIzol to T25 flasks in the past and it works fine. Although it is standard practise to scrape the cells off the flask surface I have never needed to do this. Leave the flask+ TRIzol in the fridge for 10 min and your cells will have burst open.

I totally agree with Jakatta. I keep my stocks in T75 flasks and then move to dishes or whatever multi-well plates for experiments.

labrat612 on Apr 6 2010, 09:39 AM said:

I'm in this same group. Flasks are great for keeping stocks but can be difficult to harvest for experiments.

prof. moriarty on Apr 5 2010, 07:31 PM said:

It sound cool that pick up clones from flask. Could you give me a bit more info on it, i want to know how it works. Thanks!

prof. moriarty on Apr 6 2010, 03:31 AM said:

The major advantage of flasks over dishes is that Flasks these days come with 0.22uM filtered tops. This allows the passage of CO2 through the filter BUT acts as a barrier to Incubator contamination. Dishes on the other hand are "open" and therefore there is no barrier. As stated already, it is best practice to keep growing stocks in flasks and then seed dishes/multiwell plates for experimentation. Again the added advantage for using dishes for experiments is that you can remove the lid of the dish/plates and scrape 100% of the growing surface.

Hope this is useful

Kindest regards

Uncle Rhombus