Fetal bovine serum and cell culture - (Jun/13/2006 )
My recent experiment with CHO cells bring me a question abuot FBS (fetal bovine serum) and cell growth. That is: cell growth show great difference by using different batches of FBS. If this is true, which factor can cause this problem? Endotoxin? growth factors? hormone? .....?
Thanks!
Yes, one can observe different rates of cell growth with dif. batches of FBS from the same company. the reason for this problem could be a whole lot.
More information please!
If this become a research topic, what's is your first step? At this moment I am going to look for the change of endotoxin first, cause it can cause cell death. What shall I look further if endotoxin is not a problem?
thanks!
As far as cell culture is concerned, we check different batches and which ever seems good for the cells,we buy a lot of bottles from the same batch. So we dont trouble shoot the differences of between batches. U might spend too much time on this.
If u r interested, start by making a list of all the different components of serum.Changes in any of them can make a difference. As u have suggested growth factors could make a huge difference.
Foetal Bovine serum is essential to your experiments and will potentially be a source of massive variation which you can introduce into your work.
New Zealand FBS is by far the best serum in the world....no question. You must BATCH TEST all FBS to make sure that the cells you are using are happy. We work with Nitric Oxide Synthases, and endotoxin (LPS) can induce one form of the enzyme, so we only ask to test batches with low endotoxin levels (below 0.01ng/ml).
When testing we always test batches greater than 25 x 500ml.
The testing procedure takes into account growth, viability, oxygen consumption, ATP levels, Cytochrome C content and mitochondrial enzyme complexes.
DIFFERENT BATCHES WILL GIVE YOU VARYING GROWTH RATES. So the above advise we have always followed and our group have been very sucessful over the past 20 years when it comes to publications.
Please consider: every cell which have the LPS receptor (TLR-4, CD14) will react on LPS contamination.
EndoTrap is an endotoxin removal product. More information regarding EndoTrap and how does it works you find here: www.endotrap.de