• Question: what are cuturing cells?

    Asked by anon-351356 on 13 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Graeme Dykes

      Graeme Dykes answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      Not sure what you mean by this. Please explain

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      One way scientists can understand biological processes is to simplify the problem to looking at single cells or collections of cells. They need to keep those cells alive and they do so in cell cultures… basically a soup that the cells find easy to digest to keep them alive. You can culture different types of cell from the body to look at the impact of drugs on the body.

    • Photo: Grace Roper

      Grace Roper answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      Cell culture is as Martin says :).
      Cell cultures can also be derived from diseased tissue, to help scientists understand what differences there are between healthy and diseased cells. This allows scientists to work out potential drug targets. Then candidate drugs/probes can be tested on cells to understand if they may be promising for treating the disease. However there are many more steps before a potential drug is approved.

    • Photo: Rebecca Woods

      Rebecca Woods answered on 14 Mar 2023:

      We can grow cells in the lab to either study them or test drugs/compounds/vaccines/etc on. This way we don’t have to test them on a human or animal subject at this stage. These cells or cell lines can originate from different animals (monkey, chinese hamster to name a couple) or from humans (commonly cancerous cells).

      The most fameous cell line is HeLa, and it has been cultured for 70 years, and scientists have used it to research multiple diseases and develop vaccines.

      We can also culture other organisms not just mammalian cells, we can culture various bacteria (either in liquid culture or on solid agar) yeast and parasites (and the odd airbourne contaminate).

      We grow them in plastic culture dishes/flasks with either a solid or liquid media which is a source of the nutrients (sugars/amino acids/salts) needed.

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