Strange infection In EPC cells - I could use help identifying them... (Oct/12/2010 )

Recently, while culture my cells I noticed spheres with little moving things in them. It almost seems as if something invaded the cell, caused it to detach fro the plate and used it to grow. I tried treating these cells with Ampicilin and gentimycin (and the have pen/strep in the media). This seemed to be working at first, but I left them alone for a few days and came back to see something wrather strange. I tried taking pictures at 40x (+10x optical for a total of 400x) with a phase contrast microscope. Unfortunately, given the multi-dimensionality of the infection it was hard to capture what I was seeing. There seemed to be tangles of what looked like hair and a few longer strands swimming accross the viewing area from time to time. I'm not sure where to even start with this. One of my friends believes this is protozoan, but I'm leading more towards a bacillus infection.





Thanks in advance,
APoreUT

It is either that you have fluff in your culture or that you have fungal contamination.

It isn't "fluff" because it is growing" and it the fact that it moves also rules out being fluff. As far as I know, fungal infections can't swim through the dish as smaller stick-like shapes?

fungus then

bob1 on Wed Oct 13 23:15:33 2010 said:

It does if it is floating, just as dead cells do - brownian motion and/or currents in the fluid.

Flagellate bacteria can also move by, but the thing you showed is too big for a bacterium.

I agree- looks like you have fungal contamination.