12 Fascinating Insights About Cell Culture You Might Not Know

Without growth in cell culture, biomedical and clinical studies would not be possible. Since the early 1900s, this tool has greatly changed and is now an essential part of life sciences research. In contrast to its inception, nowadays, cell culture is an essential part of 3D culture, tissue engineering, 3D bioprinting, and regenerative treatments. If you want to be a researcher, you must know all the intricacies of cell culture. However, cell culture is a very broad field, and many facts are still lost in the past.

In this article, we present a few lesser-known facts that can help you exclaim and love cell culture more!

1. More Than 32,000 Papers Rely On Misidentified Cell Line Data: In the case of cell lines, misidentification is a relevant problem and studies estimate that over 32,000 papers report their data based on the work done on misidentified cell lines. The problem booms exponentially when a plethora of other papers cite these reports, leading to a contaminated pool of data (Horbach and Halffman, 2017).
2. 70% of Researchers Fail To Reproduce The Data Of Experiments: A Nature survey suggested that 70% of more than 1,500 researchers were unable to reproduce clinical research experiments and 50% of them even failed to reproduce their ones.
3. First Successful Cell Culture: Frog Nerve Fibers: An American zoologist, Ross Granville Harrison, was able to grow animal cells outside the body successfully in 1907. He grew frog nerve fibers using the hanging drop method in a lymph medium (Abercrombie, 1961).
4. HeLa Cell Line Was Established Without The Consent Of Henrietta Lacks: It might not be a grand surprise for many researchers that the HeLa cell line was the first to be immortalized in 1951. But, interestingly, such ground-breaking progress in the biomedical cell culture field was made without the consent of the human source, Henrietta Lacks, or her relatives. This raised numerous concerns about ethical privacy and patients’ rights in research.
5. The First Synthetic Mammalian Cell Culture Medium Was Created In 1950: J.F. Morgan developed medium 199 in 1950 and it was the first synthetic media for mammalian cell culture (Morgan et al., 1950). This development helped an efficient medium for vaccine production and allowed large-scale manufacturing of polio vaccines in 1955. 
6. Cell Cultures Can Be Contaminated By Plastics: Viruses, bacteria, fungi, mycoplasma, and endotoxins are common contaminants in cell culture. But little do we acknowledge the contamination by plasticizers from plastic instruments. These plasticizers have been shown that they can contaminate cell culture and alter cell physiology (Yao and Asayama, 2017).
7. Pluripotent Stem Cells Can Help In Growing Mini-Brains: In 2013, researchers from the University of Vienna developed brain organoids or “mini-brains” in the lab using human pluripotent stem cells and a 3D matrix for support. The generated brain organoids showed different nerve cell types and structurally mimicked mammalian brains (Lancaster et al., 2013).
8. Fat Tissues To Heart: Success Of 3D Bioprinting: In 2019, researchers from Tel Aviv University’s School of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology developed a new protocol for generating 3D-printed thick and perfusable vascular hearts from a fat tissue biopsy. The 3D-printed hearts anatomically mimicked the properties of the original heart but lacked functionality (Noor et al., 2019).
9. Supercooling Can Enhance Organ Ex Vivo Life: A 2019 article in Nature Biotechnology has shown that supercooling human livers to -4ºC for storage can prevent ice formation. Thus extending the ex vivo life from 12 to 27 hours (de Vries et al., 2019).
10. The cell culture microenvironment significantly impacts the cell morphology: It is crucial to consider how individual components in cell culture media interact with each other. The media provide a microenvironment that can contribute significantly to the cell morphology and their response. Even a few recent studies have shown that media component interactions can have effects that can not always be predicted (Yao and Asayama, 2017; Kim and Audet, 2019). Jordahl et al., 2019 showed that a 3D network of fibronectin fibers could provide a natural environment for studying cancerous cells to develop personalized therapeutic approaches.
11. Artificial intelligence will expedite cell culture studies: With extensive research done on artificial intelligence, they are quickly becoming a research partner for cell biology. Several emerging tools are assisting in
• reducing variability in sample collection (Grexa et al., 2021)
• recognizing stem cell type (Kusumoto, D. and Yuasa, S., 2019)
• cellular image analysis (Moen et al., 2019)
These inclusions on AI are just the beginning of how it can help researchers expedite cell culture studies.
12. The 3D Cell Culture Market Could Reach Nearly USD Four Billion In 2030:In 2022, the global 3D cell culture market was valued at 1.48 billion USD, and according to Grand View Research, it will reach 3.31 billion USD by 2030 with an annual growth rate of around 11.04%.

There are several other interesting cell culture facts to know for budding researchers. For more such information, contact info@kosheeka.com. If your lab is looking for tissue-specific primary cell culture, you can also visit our website at https://kosheeka.com.

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Created on Nov 30th 2023 23:23. Viewed 93 times.

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