• Question: what method do you use to take care of the cells

    Asked by anon-267899 to Suzan on 19 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Suzan Kors

      Suzan Kors answered on 19 Nov 2020:

      We keep the cells in a plastic box, which can be a lidded dish or a flask. The cells stick to the bottom of the dish/flask. We add a liquid that contains all the nutrients (sugar for instance) that the cells need to stay happy and healthy. You can’t see the cells in the dish/flask by eye…. they are too small, so for this we use a microscope.
      Cells like to be at 37 degrees Celsius, the temperature of your body. That’s why we put the cells in an incubator, which is an device that stays always at 37 C.
      The cells will grow and divide into more cells, so after 2 days your dish/flask will be full of cells and they don’t have any space to grow further. Then it’s time to bring them to a place were it is clean (sterile), so that when we open the dish/flask nothing can infect the cells (called contamination, with for instance bacteria, viruses or fungi). There we carefully take the cells from the bottom and bring a few them into a new dish/flask with fresh liquid, so that they have again enough space and nutrients to grow.
      Normally I make several dishes/flasks, so that I have enough cells to do experiments with. I add for instance different drugs to dishes, to see how this changes the cell compartments, called organelles (do they get bigger?, do they disappear?, do they move to another place in the cell?). I always use one dish as a control: I don’t add a drug, so that I know how the cells look normally and can compare the treated cell to.

Comments

  • Photo: Thomas

    Thomas commented on :

    I do most of my work with yeast cells, which are a less complicated version of a human cell! I grow them on a kind of jelly in dishes.

    When I want to grow some new yeast, I heat up a metal loop using a bunsen burner flame to kill any bacteria/other yeast that might be on it, then take a bit from an old jelly-dish and spread it on a new one. If I want a lot of yeast for an experiment, I take a bit with my metal loop and put it in a sterile tube with liquid food (the same as the dishes, but without the jelly part that makes it set) and put it in a shaker, which shakes the tube around so the yeast get lots of oxygen to grow

  • Photo: Jamie

    Jamie commented on :

    This is such a cool question because there are so many things and so many different ways – and can you believe, scientists are still coming up with new and amazing ideas now!
    The best part about being in the lab is that you can try things and you might just discover something amazing. The cells we are working on in our lab work great when we grow them in small little dishes with mesh in the middle – like a sieve! But we just came up with a cool new idea to improve this and now we are 3D printing the plan.
    The most tricky bit is keeping them fed, my cells are very needy and I have to give them new media (filled with all the nutrients they need, and bright pink!) every single day! But it is all worth it to see them grow.