Medium - (Jan/14/2015 )

In general, about how long can you leave your medium in a water bath (37*C) before it begins to go bad?

That you can only find out by a series of time-course experiments using dozens of media tested on hundreds of cell lines and checking the cells not only for death, but microarray expression analysis. Meaning, it is difficult to say.

The culture media are complex solutions; each ingredient with its own half-life and sensitivity to temperature. With that said, you keep cells in culture at 37'C with the same media for 2-4 days, so just try not to leave them too long in water bath (couple of days at the most). If you do keep it in water bath for more than a few hours, go ahead and label it with this information, and use it quickly on the cells which don't have a crucial experiment coming up (you will be fine with a medium left for 2 weeks at 37' in that case).

CPRES on Wed Jan 14 21:25:50 2015 said:

That you can only find out by a series of time-course experiments using dozens of media tested on hundreds of cell lines and checking the cells not only for death, but microarray expression analysis. Meaning, it is difficult to say.

 

The culture media are complex solutions; each ingredient with its own half-life and sensitivity to temperature. With that said, you keep cells in culture at 37'C with the same media for 2-4 days, so just try not to leave them too long in water bath (couple of days at the most). If you do keep it in water bath for more than a few hours, go ahead and label it with this information, and use it quickly on the cells which don't have a crucial experiment coming up (you will be fine with a medium left for 2 weeks at 37' in that case).

Very helpful, thank you!