Accidental thawing of frozen cells - (Jun/14/2010 )

Hi everyone,

I froze a batch of IMR-90 fetal lung fibroblasts two days ago on Saturday, and left them in the -80 C freezer. Yesterday, another PhD student came in and moved my cells to the -20 C freezer. Will this damage my cells? If yes, any idea how severe the damage will be?

Thanks everyone for reading this. I'm really worried now as the cells are precious young cells that I had just expanded.

-Juri-

Hi,

I dont know if moving them to -20C would damage them. However our lab recently had to move a good amount of cells from liquid nitrogen storage to -80C for 24 hours as our N2 tank had run out. These cells were able to grow no problem when thawed and cultured. The temperature shift was from -200C to -80 and the cells were ok. I would say your cells will be fine if they were left in -20C for only a short time period. Theres only one way to find out and thats to grow them though.

-jakatta70-

Juri on Jun 14 2010, 07:54 AM said:

the question is if the cells were liquid at -20°C; the best is to re-culture and save those which survived

-Inmost sun-

Inmost sun on Jun 16 2010, 05:03 AM said:

Juri on Jun 14 2010, 07:54 AM said:

the question is if the cells were liquid at -20°C; the best is to re-culture and save those which survived

I thawed out one vial to test their viability and found the cells had died.

Oh well.

-Juri-