Cell Culture

Overview

Cell culture is an important tool that is used throughout biomedical science. It is used in basic science to investigate the normal physiology and biochemistry of organisms, and also provides an excellent model system for the study of disease states and the effects of drugs and toxic compounds.

Stratech offer specialist media and cell culture reagents to help you get the best from your cells.

• Media
• Selection of Antibiotics

Suppliers

• Affymetrix USB
• Corning Media
• Selleck Chemicals
• USBio

Media

Stratech’s media range includes media and reagents for many cell culture applications. The manufacturers we supply provide an advantage versus other media producers in that as well as standard microbial and metazoan cell culture media they supply custom and rare formulations. We can provide media in a range of batch and pack sizes, and can arrange custom-bagged media for large scale culturing and bioprocess applications on request. All media products in our offering are produced to the highest quality standards to ensure excellent performance.

Standard Media & Cell Culture Reagents supplied by Stratech:

Microbial Reagents

• LB Broth & Agar
• Miller’s LB Broth
• 2xYT Broth
• Terrific Broth (TB)
• S.O.C Medium
• X-GAL & IPTG
• NZCYM
• Tryptic Soy Broth (TSB)
• Selection Antibiotics

Metazoan reagents

• DMEM
• RPMI 1640
• Penicillin/Streptomycin
• McCoys 5A
• MEM Vitamins & Amino acids
• Medium 199
• MCDB 131
• Sf9 growth media
• Selection Antibiotics

Selection of Antibiotics

Transfection of extrachromosomal DNA into tissue culture cells or transformation into bacteria is never 100% efficient. In any transfection there will always be a certain proportion of cells that fail to retain your DNA construct. It is therefore standard practice to transfect foreign ‘DNA of interest’ in a vector construct alongside a specific antibiotic resistance gene. Selection antibiotics added to the culture media after transfection ensure that only those cells expressing antibiotic resistance, and thus containing your transfected DNA, will survive.

Stratech provide a wide range of antibiotics for both microbial and metazoan selection, including:

Antibiotics for microbiological use

• Ampicillin:   Bactericidal*, inhibits cell wall biosynthesis
• ­Bacitracin:  Bactericidal*, inhibits cell wall biosynthesis
• Carbenicillin: Superior, more stable alternative to Ampicillin
• Ciprofloxacin: Bactericidal, inhibits prokaryotic topoisomerases
• Chloramphenicol: Bacteriostatic, inhibits prokaryotic ribosome
• Kanamycin: Bactericidal, disrupts ribosomal protein translation
• Rifampin: Bactericidal, disrupts prokaryotic RNA polymerase
• Tetracycline: Bacteriostatic, blocks tRNA binding in translation

Antibiotics for metazoan tissue culture use

• Blasticidin S HCl: Inhibits protein translation (especially its termination)
• Dihydrostreptomycin: Bactericidal, may be less toxic than Streptomycin
• G418: Gentamicin analogue. Inhibits translation elongation.
• Gentamicin: Irreversibly binds and inhibits 30S ribosomal subunit
• Hygromycin B: Inhibits translocation in protein translation
• Neomycin: Irreversibly binds and inhibits 30S ribosomal subunit
• Penicillin G: Bactericidal*, inhibits cell wall biosynthesis
• Puromycin: Inhibits translation via premature chain termination
• Streptomycin: Bactericidal, disrupts ribosomal translation

* Note that many antibiotics can be either bacteriocidal or bacteriostatic dependant on concentration. The beta lactams, which inhibit cell wall biosynthesis, are bactericidal to proliferating gram-positive bacteria, but may appear to be bacteriostatic in lab use.