Tissue culture and cell culture? - (Mar/18/2005 )

What is the difference between Tissue culture and cell culture?

And when we talk about transformation in mammalian cells , does it mean that we transform the cells into cancer cells?

Thanks for any ideas.

Tissue culture usually refers to both organ culture and cell culture. You can use "cell culture" and "tissue culture" interchangeably.
As for transformation, there are two main types of cells that you can culture: primary cells, which are explanted directly from a donor organism and will eventually senesce and die, and inmortalized cell lines, which are also known as transformed cells and continue to grow and divide indefinitely in vitro for as long as the correct culture conditions are maintained. However, not all these immortalized/transformed cells will form tumors when introduced into an animal, which is the condition for a cell to be considered tumoral or cancer cell. So, transformed cell is NOT synominous of cancer/tumoral cell (Some of the immortalized cells are able to form tumors and thus are also cancer cells, but other immortalized cells are not). Transformation can occur by infection by transforming tumour viruses, by chromosomal changes...
Hope that it helps. Cheers!

Thank you very much, badcell. I am doing my cell culture and here are some more questions related to it, so i hope that you guys can help me out. I think it is better that i keep these questions in this same thread.


What does it mean when it says in the context of selection of serum and medium: "Established cell lines- Simple media- Eagle’s MEM + serum" ? What are established cell lines?

Thanks for any ideas.

hi
established cell lines are cell lines that have been tested for many passages and don't change their characteristics (gene exprssion, morphology, morphotype...) They are quite old and their clturing conditions are well known.