the outer wells - (Oct/11/2007 )
hey
in our lab people are wont to fill the outer wells of a 96 well plate with PBS instead of seeding cells in them. the reason is that apperantly cells will not grow equally well in this wells. this has been an accepted custom for several years now but noone ever questioned this.
so is it true? are cells behaving odd in the outer wells or is this a lab myth? do you do the same in your lab?
thanks in advance
in our lab people are wont to fill the outer wells of a 96 well plate with PBS instead of seeding cells in them. the reason is that apperantly cells will not grow equally well in this wells. this has been an accepted custom for several years now but noone ever questioned this.
so is it true? are cells behaving odd in the outer wells or is this a lab myth? do you do the same in your lab?
thanks in advance
outer wells tend to lose more water by evaporation. test it for yourself. Take a plate and fill it with equal volumes of water and leave it int he incubator and check after few days.
We donot use outer wells even in a 24 well plate.
in our lab people are wont to fill the outer wells of a 96 well plate with PBS instead of seeding cells in them. the reason is that apperantly cells will not grow equally well in this wells. this has been an accepted custom for several years now but noone ever questioned this.
so is it true? are cells behaving odd in the outer wells or is this a lab myth? do you do the same in your lab?
thanks in advance
as scolix says but frequent change of medium may compensate loss of water
It also depends on the length of your experiment. If you would do a 24-hour assay and have enough medium, you should be able to go for it.
If you want to look up more on this, the phenomenon is known as "edge effect." There's really no good way to get around it, other than do what your labmates already do and fill the outer wells with PBS. I've read something about leaving your plates out for a certain period of time before placing into the incubator - my lab tried it, but getting the time calibrated to what our cells were doing was more trouble than it was worth.