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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Antibiotics in Cell Culture – What types are available and when and how to utilize them
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So I have some questions. For your neuron growth do you add serum to your Neurobasal A medium and do you use a feeder layer for growth or coat the wells?. I guess the question is what is different about your two cultures. I assume both cell types are isolated from the same tissue at the same time?
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