Plastic fibres (from the pipettes in my DMEM) - (Sep/25/2014 )

Hello everyone,

I am a PhD student and today I have observed a small plastic fibre in my DMEM (I assume that it is from my 5, 10 or 25 mL pipettes). I have also carefully taken it out to see what it was but I am not sure whether this plastic could contaminate my DMEM, as I have used this medium for splitting the cells.

My medium contains pen/strep and 10% FBS and I do know that these antibiotics don't work on mycoplasma.

Thanks.

Ahmad

A h m a d on Thu Sep 25 14:00:30 2014 said:

Hello everyone,

 

I am a PhD student and today I have observed a small plastic fibre in my DMEM (I assume that it is from my 5, 10 or 25 mL pipettes). I have also carefully taken it out to see what it was but I am not sure whether this plastic could contaminate my DMEM, as I have used this medium for splitting the cells.

 

My medium contains pen/strep and 10% FBS and I do know that these antibiotics don't work on mycoplasma.

 

Thanks.

 

Ahmad

Would be good if you can take a picture of the unidentified object. It sounds like you're using normal magnification for this so you probably can't see mycoplasma infections. If any, it could be something fungal. Sometimes you will see the odd debris or two from the FBS,

Are you sure it is a plastic fibre and not an FBS precipitate ?
I dont think that the chance of mycoplasma contamination is likely if it was a plastic fibre from your pipet because you hopefully handled the pipet in a sterile way. If you observe anything like decrease of cell viability or growth, you could still do a mycoplasm test to check.