power cut - (Jul/20/2006 )

does anyone know how long cell lines can tolerate not having C02 - we just had a powercut in the whole building - Im not too worried about the incubator temp as the room temp is about 30 oC so it shouldnt drop too fast......but the power has now been off for 2 h and its evening here so does anyone think my cells will survive O/N with lower CO2 levels....there is a weeks worth of 12 h days in that incubator

well... as you can't accelerate the return of pwer....
I've noticed that unopened chambers keep relative long the CO2. And the dammage wasn't remarkable after an overnight no-CO2 with my cells.

thats good to know with any luck it might come back on at some stage during the night

well, how many cells is a factor too...the more cells growing, the quicker they use up the CO2...I bet if you only have a few cells, you can go quite a long time and temp will be your bigger concern...if you have a loaded incubator, you may run into trouble

do you have a fyrite tester you can use to monitor the CO2? perhaps test every 6 or 8 hours? you don't want to do it too often, or you will deplete the CO2 yourself..but if it stays off long you'll have to know

its pretty full alright. I dont have anything to test CO2 with. I dont think security want anyone in there either - the power cut happened throughout the whole university i think. alarms going off all over the place. I have loads off plaque assays in there and i really hope they are ok they took so long to do . . . .i really dont want to have to do them again

Just leave your incubator closed as long as possible. Some cell lines are more sensitive to CO2 changes than others are. I grow cells @ 5% CO2, but they've gone up to about 10% (indication still gave 5 but we test regularly) with some problems for certain cells, while others didn't bother too much. Same happened when we got down to about 2%. It all depends on your cells, but if you don't open your incubator too often, and don't have too much cells in there you should be all right. Power cuts probably don't last more than 24 hours.

dont open your incubator as much as posible and it should be fine as sometimes ATCC ships their cell lines in flasks overnight.(the cap is tightly closed)

the power came back on again. phew, what a relief I wouldnt have minded having to take cells out of stock again, but im so relieved my plaque assays will be ok......the thoughts of having to do a hundred million dilutions again....(well not quite a hundred million, but in this weather it certainly felt like it )

Great, u dont have to do any more dilutions.

Had similar problem in my lab too. Power failure due to tornado. Luckily my cells r fine. As long as one doesnt open incubator, it maintians temp. and CO2 for sometime unless its overnight.