Why 10% serum for cell culture? - (Jun/19/2008 )

why we using 10 % serum in the media. what happens is we increase or decrease the percentage of the trypsin.

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% of serum is medium is depending on the cell type that you culture, I sometimes use 5%, 20% for different cells.
changing trypsin concentration should not do anything too much in my opinion, but if you change it, you need to change the incubation time for detaching cell so it will not digest your cell.

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Trypsin will somehow introduce more stress to the cells. That is why we need to deactivate it by adding serum media.

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10% is just found to be minimal amount required to be good for most cell lines (Serum is expensive--and cruel too!). But many cell lines require higher serum, and many do just fine with lower. You can even get away without serum with certain cancer cell lines using some synthetic components added to medium.

Serum is just used as a hotch-potch of survival factors that we have not yet identified, but required for cell growth and survival.

Trypsin damages cytoplasmic membrane, so you want to keep it to a minimum in concentration/incubation, immediately quenching it with serum once your purpose is served.

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Dear Calvin,

10% Serum........what does this actually mean?

Please put the following serums in order of quality?

British, European, New Zealand, Australian, North American, South American?

My point is that 10% serum from one country of origin is WORTH PROBABLY 70-100% from another...........this is related also to the price:-

£25, £45-£50, £250, £180, £120, £100.......please fit the price to the above country of origin?

Kindest regards

Rhombus

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I believe pricing has to do with the GARANTEED absence of a certain disease in a country for a certain amount of time. 10% usually means a part FCS added to 9 parts medium. As to the quality quenstion: in my opinion it is more important to have a steady supply of FCS with little variation in quality/components/source.

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LINK

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Oh dear, here we go again.

Just for information: You are correct about NZ being the only BSE free country in the world

HOWEVER

The quality of NZ serum is the BEST IN THE WORLD. We do the following tests:

Viability
Growth
Induction of iNOS Enzyme
Oxygen consumption
cGMP content of RASMC
Cytochrome C concentration within J744 and Jurkats
Oxidation/Reduction states of mitochondrial enzyme complexes
Sodium Channel expression in transfected HEK cells

IN ALL THE ABOVE NZ SERUM IS SUPERIOR TO ALL OTHER SERUMS.

i.e. Greater number of channels expressed, 80% greater induction of iNOS, greater oxygen consumption etc etc etc.


There are even differences between NZ batches....thus we BATCH TEST to make sure that the results we get are consistant to that we got 5/10/15 years ago.

I hope this is clear

Kindest regards

Rhombus

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Dear Rhombus,

Do your lab rountinely use serum from New Zealand, even if it is extremely expensive?

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