HEK en HeLa medium - (May/21/2007 )

Hi,

I want to culture HEK and HeLa cells at my university. I used them before at my internship.
At my internship, I used IMDM medium for HEK, so I purchased this medium again. However, a lot of different site recommend DMEM medium.
Is it a problem for HEK and HeLa cells to use IMDM medium with HEPES buffer?

Technically you should use the ATCC recommended media for each cell line, but these may be very similar media compositions (i dont know) and if it worked with the same cells before... I think you should look at the media formulations and what is recommended by ATCC and then make an educated decision... Switching culture media may have an effect on your cells so I don't know what you should do. For example, I got Jurkat cells from another lab. They used IMDM, where ATCC uses RPMI, but we kept them in IMDM because we didn't want to switch again, and we had no way of knowing why the other lab used IMDM (I have seen where IMDM may buffer the cells better or maybe it was a subclone etc. they didn't keep the best records but we had no money to get cells from ATCC) when we got money and bought a new culture from ATCC we used RPMI as ATCC suggests... For my gene of interest both the old and new lines looked identical, that is not to say they were identical in all ways though... anyway hope this helps and good luck!

Thank you for your advise, but I still dont know the exact effect of the HEPES buffer.
Can this buffer be toxic for the cellsif the grew before without HEPES?

as far as I remember HEPES buffers the media so that the pH is more stable (turns yellow slower)