CELLnTEC media have been developed to optimize the isolation and further growth of epithelial cells from human, mouse or rat tissue. We appreciate you conducting a side-by-side test with your current medium to evaluate CELLnTEC medium’s performance in your laboratory.

Medium performance is known to be affected by many factors. Please consider the following when designing and conducting your evaluation experiment:

Switching Media

It is common for cells grown in one medium to become accustomed to the medium’s component profile, especially if it contains FCS or BPE. Over several passages, this can lead to certain cell sub-populations being preferentially selected.

Such “selected” populations are more difficult to switch into new media, and should be avoided. Only after these cells have been weaned away from their original medium by serial dilution into the new medium can a fair comparison be made.

A fairer comparison is to freshly isolate cells in both your existing medium and in CELLnTEC medium.

Read more about how we recommend to switch media in our FAQ's.

Seeding Density

CELLnTEC’s media encourage the growth of progenitor cells without the need for additional components such as feeder layers, conditioned medium, plate coating or other supplements. However at low seeding densities, such factors or treatments may be beneficial – please see the protocol page in our resources section for the recommended seeding densities.

Supplementation

To ensure equal comparison, we ask that if you are currently supplementing your medium with additional components, that you test our sample with and without these components to determine the dependence of your cells on these components.

For routine cell cultivation, CELLnTEC recommends to work without antibiotics / antimycotics. For isolation, however, we recommend the use of antibiotics / antimycotics up to passage 2.

Trypsinization

Serum free media are not suitable for stopping the trypsinization reaction, as they do not contain the necessary inhibitory proteins. To avoid the use of serum, we recommend use a trypsin inhibitor like soy bean trypsin inhibitor. See also our FAQ's on the use of enzymes.

Other Variables

Isolation efficiency and culture growth are also affected by variables such as tissue donor, age of donor, species, and animal strain (especially for mice).

For more information about your specific situation, please contact CELLnTEC at scientistcellntec [dot] com.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing your results.

For a PDF version of these recommendations, please click here.