Contamination - How to deal? - Help (Sep/17/2005 )

Dear all,

I'm just a beginner for cell culture. Recently I just bought a new cell line (fibroblast) and found that there are contamination in the culture.

As this is the only cell stock in my lab, is that anyway to do to solve this problem and at the same time save my contaminated cell?

Thanks,.

What kind of contamination? Do you have a picture or better description?
Are you culturing in antibiotics?
If you bought the cell line as you mentioned and it is contaminated, call the company ASAP and demand they send you a new vial or get a refund (unless you think the contamination comes from you).

Tell us more and we will help.

Assuming you know how to work with tissue cultures (hood, sterility rules etc.) - it depends on the type of contamination. If it's mycoplasma - the most common type of contamination in tissue cultures - it can be easily detected by specific PCR kits, and can be irradicated using special antibiotics such as the commercially availabe BioMyc (from "Biological Industries") that we have in our lab

I think that you can not do anything, for my experience if you can see this contamination under microscope you have some bacterias or fungies in you cultures. For the future you should work carfully and add antybiotics.
good luck

However, when adding antibiotics have in mind that adding too much can hurt your project as you might end up with low levels of contamination that won't be detectable for a while. Such cells might act quite differently and data you get from low-contaminated cells can be misleading. in any case, good luck