Are TC-treated flasks/plates harmful to suspension cells. If so, why? - (Mar/26/2007 )

Are TC-treated flasks/plates harmful to suspension cells. If so, why?

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I don't think they are 'harmful' because we do grow some suspension cells in T flasks. They are fine. But my experience says that, some suspension cells don't like to be grown in stationary phase i.e. T flasks - I am saying this because, normally all suspension cells stick to the bottom initially but only loosely. They do get detached and become suspension when agitated or even pipetted up and down. But one of my suspension cells - we did transductions in a 6W plate - when left in stationary phase (either in 6W plated or T25) don't grow fast and also the V% was low. Once transferred to a shaker flask, they grew pretty fast with good V%.
So TC treateed flask is not harmful but some suspension cells exclusively prefer rotation culturing.

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We start off some of our suspension cultures in TC flasks i.e. Jurkat, HL-60 etc. There is no detrimental effect with TC flasks. I agree with scifi that they are happier in suspension stirrers, we use Techne stirring flasks. There are some cells however like J774 which are murine macrophages that stick like superglue to TC flasks and are therefore easier to grow as suspension cultures. The added advantage to growing cells like this is that there is no trypsinisation and the glass stirrers can be reused over and over again.

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