Cell Culture Contamination

Cell cultures are very important in laboratory biomedical sciences research. Culture in vitro facilitates analysis of cells in a controlled environment, minimizes morbidity and mortality of human, animal or plant subjects, and enables replicate studies over long periods of time. The main difficulty with cell cultures is their propensity to contamination, whether by microbes or stray cells from other cultures in the laboratory.

Keywords: cell culture; tissue culture; aseptic technique; contamination; microbial; cross-contamination

 Further Reading
    Anonymous (2001) Contamination of cell lines – a conspiracy of silence. Lancet Oncology 2: 393.
    book Freshney RI (2000) Culture of Animal Cells: A Manual of Basic Technique, 4th edn. New York: Wiley-Liss.
    book Freshney RI and Pfragner R (2003) Culture of Human Tumor Cells. New York: Wiley-Liss.
    MacLeod RAF, Dirks WG, Matsuo Y et al. (1999) Widespread intraspecies cross-contamination of human tumor cell lines arising at source. International Journal of Cancer 83: 555–563.
    Masters JR, Thomson JA, Daly-Burns B et al. (2001) Short tandem repeat profiling provides an international reference standard for human cell lines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 98: 8012–8017.
    Nelson-Rees WA, Daniels DW and Flandermeyer RR (1981) Cross-contamination of cells in culture. Science 212: 446–452.
    Vierck JL, Byrne K, Mir PS and Dodson MV (2000) Ten commandments for preventing contamination of primary cell cultures. Methods in Cell Science 22: 33–41.
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Gollin, Susanne M(Mar 2004) Cell Culture Contamination. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1038/npg.els.0002560]