Why would you want to use antibiotics at all? Can’t good cell culture techniques eliminate their use.

This question is part of the following Ask The Expert session:

Antibiotics in Cell Culture – What types are available and when and how to utilize them

Answered by:

Timothy Fawcett, Ph.D.

Company: BioTechnical Institute of Maryland

Job Title: Director

Answer

You are right in a perfect world and the best thing would be to not use antibiotics at all. Some might need antibiotics if their equipment or air-handling systems are not perfect. Some might use certain antibiotics for selection. Others might use antibiotics during primary culture. Sometimes it might be necessary, but if possible I try to do without it. If you are learning cell culture I strongly recommend not using antibiotics so that you can learn good technique quickly and not develop bad habits that may be masked by antibiotic use.

Next Question:

We are having troubles with contamination in our primary cell cultures of neurons. I have been working with cell cultures for more than 7 years and I’ve never faced a contamination. The interesting part is that only our neurons culture get contaminated; our glial cells are always safe. For culturing neurons we use Neurobasal-A (Gibco 10888-022) supplemented with 1% antibiotics/antimycotic (Gibco 15240-062) and for culturing glia cells, we use DMEM. In our last experiment, we increased antibiotics/antimycotic concentration for 2%, but we still had contamination in some wells of the cell culture plate (with bacteria and fungi). What may be happening? Do you have some advice for us?

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