cell culture
Meaning of cell culture: The laboratory craft of keeping living cells growing outside the body, which depends more on excluding contamination than on feeding them.
Definition of cell culture
Cell culture is the technique of growing cells outside their original organism under controlled conditions. Cells are placed in a vessel with a nutrient liquid and held at body temperature in an incubator that regulates humidity and carbon dioxide. The method underpins vaccine production, drug testing, genetic research and the manufacture of protein-based medicines.
What does the method involve?
Cells are separated from tissue, usually with enzymes, and placed in a flask or dish. The nutrient liquid, called medium, supplies sugars, amino acids, salts and growth factors, often from animal serum. Waste accumulates and nutrients run down, so the medium is replaced regularly. Most human cells are anchorage-dependent, meaning they must attach to a surface to survive, and they stop dividing once they cover it. Before that point they are detached and split into new vessels, a step called passaging.
How is it different from culturing bacteria from a sample?
| Cell culture | Diagnostic culture | |
|---|---|---|
| What is grown | Cells from a body or a cell line | Organisms from a clinical sample |
| Purpose | Research and manufacture | Identify the cause of infection |
| Timescale | Weeks to years | Hours to days |
| Contamination | Ruins the experiment | Confuses the result |
A diagnostic culture deliberately grows bacteria from a swab or fluid. In cell culture those same organisms are the enemy, since they multiply far faster than human cells and destroy the culture within a day or two.
What are the harder problems?
Sterile technique dominates the work. Everything entering the vessel is sterilized, work is done in a cabinet with filtered airflow, and antibiotics are sometimes added, although relying on them masks poor technique. Mycoplasma is the notorious contaminant: too small to see, it does not cloud the medium and can persist for months while quietly altering how the cells behave. Growing cells flat on plastic also fails to reproduce how tissue is arranged in the body, which has driven the development of three-dimensional cultures and of co-culture, where two or more cell types are grown together so their interaction can be studied.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
The virus was propagated in cell culture before further characterization.
Good to know
Mycoplasma contamination is invisible and does not cloud the medium, yet it changes how cultured cells behave, which is why routine screening rather than inspection is used to detect it.