How often do you change culture vessels? - (May/04/2006 )

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiousity: Do you replace the dish/flask in which you grow the cells EACH SPLIT? i.e. if you split your cells twice a week, do you seed your cells onto a new flask/plate? If not, how often do you replace the plate?

I split my cells (mainly NIH3T3 and other lines) 2 times a week, but I change the plate approx. every fourth passage.

Thanks in advance for your answers

I'm kind of curious about this answer too. I'm always tempted to put my cells in new flasks every time I split them. However I don't change the flask as often as that (probably around every third passage). I split my cells once or twice a week depending on their growth rates.

So you guys are just re-using the plate that you detach your cells from?

My PI has me use 2 new plates each time I split. We go through a TON of plates.

_Hank

Yeah we reuse the plate we detach the cells from.

That's what I feel like I should be doing ... using 2 new plates each time.

for cell lines i reuse vessel
for non immortal cell lines, i use new vessel as it's more tough culturing stuff.

Now I am using new plates after every split, since for me there was a bit larger volume in the reused plate which led to confluence in a shorter time than in the other plates. besides.... I was starting to get contamination in the reused plates...
Nevertheles... it is considerable the number of plates that you can save every time you split your cells.
For not so important experiments I reuse,, but for others where I want to have same amount of cells per plate.. I discard the old one.

To be more specific, I do what tertu describes above, i.e. "For not so important experiments I reuse,, but for others where I want to have same amount of cells per plate.. I discard the old one"

Thank you all for your replies, keep on

hi all ! do you see any morphological changes or biochemical changes or decrease in performance or response of cells grown in reused plates?
we donot reuse plates. for every spitting we use fresh plates. i would be interested in using the plates twice or trice if there is no problem with reusage. but somehow skeptical of reusing culture plates.

As I mentioned above, I don't observe any changes, and I reuse my plates for 3-4 passages. However, I, like others in this thread, also think that reusing plates is limited only to lines, and stable ones. Whenever I grow sensitive cells/primary cells I replace the dish each passage.

I dont observe any changes in cells if I use the same flask for 3-4 passages as compared to using a different flask every time. Some people change flask everytime bcoz the splitting can vary as there is always some cells in the old flask.