question about plating cells - gel or no gel? (Feb/21/2011 )

I am planning to grow a MDA-MB-231 cell culture. Eventually the cells will be conjugated with some nanoparticles and imaged, so they need to be adherent. This is an adherent cell line. So is there any reason I cannot just grow them on a bottom of a culture dish (for example, a 60mm dish) in liquid media? What is the advantage of growing them in a dish with agar or some other gel?
Thank you!

some cells just do fine without like fibroblast
but other cells need something to hand on, like gelatin or PLL,
if they cannot adhere, they will eventually die.

If you need to image them at high resolution (e.g. 400x magnification) then it will be best if you grow them on glass coverslips in 24 well plates. These lines grow well in liquid medium, but if you want to you could add soft agar which is commonly used for colony assays or getting 3-D cultures, but it is not necessary at all.