How to prepare solution for drug or hormone treatment?? - Preparing dexamethasone and estradiol solution from powder (Feb/11/2005 )

Dear all,

I am goin' to do drug treatment with my cell line growing in 24 well plates... and I am not too sure how should I dissolve the drug or hormone in powder form to make them into solutions for treatment...

the specification data sheet comes together with the chemicals has been lost and I can't find it from the company websites....

I am goin' to make dexamethasone and 17B-estradiol solution... when I read through the papers, i found that some use ethanol while the others use DMSO to dissolve the powder, I wonder which one is a better method...

I also found that people tends to prepare a stock of higher concentration for dilution into the desired concentration.... is it a must to make a 1000X stock first?? for the concentration I am goin' to use, it weighs only 0.0XXg of powder, is it because the mass is too small for dissolving that a larger concentration stock solution is made first....

and I also wanted to know if I really need to filter sterilize the solution.. if I am goin' to treat the cells for 24 hours only, it should not promote the growth of microbes....

Sorry for asking so many stupid questions.....

Thanks first^^

I'd suggest to find a company that sells the same drugs and see what they suggest to use to dissolve them.
It's not a must but very clever to make a high concentration batch to start. This way you avoid a lot of thaw/freeze cycles to your dilute solution. The 1000X factor is only the easiest way to make a solution. Scientists being known to be lazy , it's very easy to divide by 1000, just change the units (mM to µM... etc).
Considering the filtering of the solutions, do as you feel, but DMSO usually doesn't promote bacterial growth, so I wouldn't worry leaving it unfiltered.

Hope I could help!

Simon

Imo DMSO is better. You can prepare an 10mM initial dilution and store it at -20C. Filtration not necessary.
good luck

I know dexamethasone is extremely hard to dissolve in water - I buy a specific H2O soluble cell culture grade dexamethasone from Sigma to get around this problem.

i'm backing up LazyCell...DMSO should be ok for most applications.

mike