Cell Cultures
The Cell Culture Facility at CEINGE Advanced Biotechnology Franco Salvatore is responsible for acquiring, manipulating, characterising and cryopreserving human and animal cell models. Procedures for maintaining cell lines in culture are based on good laboratory practice standards, such as handling one cell line at a time, calculating population doublings to observe proliferation rates, and monitoring the maintenance of the original morphological appearance of each cell line.
Cell lines available at the facility are periodically authenticated using STR profile analysis.
EQUIPMENT
- Inverted optical microscope (Olympus)
- Laminar flow hoods (Thermo Scientific)
- Centrifuges (Beckman Coulter)
- Hera-Cell 150i incubators (Thermo Scientific)
- EnSpire multimodal plate reader (PerkinElmer)
SERVICES
1.Supply of cell lines
The CEINGE Cell Culture Facility currently has more than 200 human and animal cell lines, including both cancerous and non-cancerous lines, from a variety of tissues. These cell lines can be supplied in three forms: cryopreserved, actively growing or as cell pellets. The supply of actively growing lines includes:
- Revitalization
- evaluation of cell counts and viability
- maintenance of the culture itself.
All supplied cell lines are checked in advance for the following:
- microbiological (mycoplasma detection);
- morphology;
- proliferative capacity.
2. Amplification, estimation of cell viability and count, and cryopreservation of cell lines.
Continuous and primary human and animal cell lines can be delivered to the Cell Culture Facility, where they are appropriately amplified, and their cell count, and viability determined.
3. Mycoplasma detection assays in cell lines and/or reagents
The CEINGE Cell Culture Facility uses a bioluminescent assay (MycoAlert®) to detect mycoplasma contamination in cell lines.
4. Eradication of mycoplasma in cell lines
Mycoplasma-positive cell lines are subjected to a standardized protocol involving the preparation of five subcultures, each of which is treated with five different antibiotics.
5. Authentication of human and murine cell lines (STR profile analysis)
Authentication of human and murine cell lines by short tandem repeat (STR) profiling is essential for reliable, repeatable research. Furthermore, an increasing number of journals require cell line verification prior to publishing a scientific article. Currently, the service uses the ATCC cell STR profile system (https://www.atcc.org/search-str-database/str-profiling-analysis).
6. Consultancy and in vitro analysis of cell lines for research collaborations
CEINGE Cell Culture Facility offers research groups a consultancy service for collaboration in conducting in vitro tests or analyses on cell lines.
