31b. Buddy has just started working in a lab, and isn’t getting much guidance fr

Question

31b. Buddy has just started working in a lab, and isn’t getting much guidance from his labmates. He
isolated some individual epithelial cells from a tissue, and wants to grow them on the surface of a
plastic dish. He has tried simply resuspending the cells in a buffered saline (salt) solution, placing
them in a sterile glass dish he got from the dishwasher, and then incubating them under appropriate
conditions (temperature, humidity, gas content) in an incubator. The cells did not grow. Buddy
needs some advice on how to treat these cells so that they will be likely to grow. List two additional
(different) things that Buddy can change in culturing these cells to promote their growth.
1.______________________________________________
2. ______________________________________________

Explanation / Answer

Not sure exactly what they're looking for with the two "different" things, but most cells need a growth or nutrient medium in order to grow (which is different from just staying alive). A lot of labs culture cells in fetal bovine serum (FBS), which contains a lot of growth factors. Nutrient media contain things like amino acids, but I think they are usually used for bacterial cultures. Finally, sometimes an antibiotic is used in a cell culture to keep bacteria from growing.

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