The Why and How of Serum Removal from Your Cell Culture

 The most important component of cell culture is likely the culture medium, and various commercial media solutions have been developed as a consequence of years of research and development. Serum, most frequently foetal bovine serum, is one common ingredient for cell culture media. However, are you aware of the purpose of this addition and, more significantly, can your cells exist without it? We'll go over the advantages and disadvantages of utilising serum in your cell culture media as well as how to get rid of it if you decide to do so.

Importance of Serum in Cell Culture

To keep the cells healthy, media contains vitamins, carbohydrates, and buffering agents.  And you frequently add serum, like FBS. This is a key component of cell culture media since it contains lipids and hormones. You'll see a noticeable difference if you take the serum out of your culture medium. Consciously depriving your culture of serum will also limit cell survival and increase apoptosis, so employ this method with caution. Cell cycle synchronisation is induced by intentionally depriving your culture of serum.

Serum Is Extremely Unpredictable 

The serum is a naturally occurring substance with an animal source, and each fresh material lot will differ. While serum does contain elements crucial to the well-being of your cells, it also contains elements such as immune complement proteins that might damage your cells.

The serum is typically boiled to render dangerous proteins inactive as a workaround. It goes without saying that heat will also deform helpful proteins, which can enhance the heterogeneity between media compositions.

Serum may contain contaminants

Contamination with germs or viruses is another possible concern with serum. Once more, there can be variation from lot to lot, and heat inactivation may not destroy microbial pathogens. Your cells' health and growth will be impacted by polluted serum, making them useless for experimentation.

The Animal Product Serum

Turning serum-free also supports the three R's for reducing the use of animals in research: refinement, reduction, and replacement.

Negative Effects of Serum-Free Media

Perhaps you are certain that eliminating serum is the best course of action for your cell culture. Finding the ideal combination of growth elements to sustain your culture is one of the investments, but this is true of many scientific endeavours.

The requirements of many developed cell lines vary and are intricate. The ideal culturing parameters can even vary between cell passages! The challenge you have ahead of you will be rather difficult if you include primary cell cultures or cultures that are in suspension. Nevertheless, you aren't alone and can find a plethora of trustworthy resources online. For common immortalised cell lines like Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells, numerous cultural medium producers have created specialised serum-free formulations.

Other negative impacts of going serum-free involve decreased cell growth and cell clumping during passaging, in addition to the challenge of creating the ideal serum-free circumstances. The slower pace of growth can be helped by continuing to optimise the culture conditions, and gentle frequent pipetting of cell clusters should be sufficient to spread them out.