Maintenance of Fibroblasts in Artificial and Serumless Media

Abstract

The importance of developing artificial media, which can be used in place of serum for maintaining the life of organs and tissues outside the body, hardly needs to be emphasized. Many of the studies for which the organ-culture technic was invented, as well as others that can be carried out by the simpler methods of tissue-culture, depend for their success on the creation of suitable artificial media. These media are needed to reduce the cost of experimentation, to make possible extensive work with human organs and those of small animals from which serum in large quantity cannot be obtained, and for all studies in which the production of serum and other protein substances is to be investigated. For cultivating organs and for all work with tissues in which function rather than growth is the subject of study, it is important that these media maintain the cells without causing proliferation. All the artificial media previously reported have been designed to promote growth. The media to be described in this paper were designed for maintenance. One of them is serumless. In the others, a very small amount of serum has been incorporated. The results obtained when these media were used to maintain a pure strain of fibroblasts in tissue-culture are described below. Experiments in which they were used for cultivating organs will be reported in another communication. To bring the vitamin A into solution, it was necessary to dissolve it at high concentration in serum and then use a small amount of this serum in the medium The concentration required proved to be only 0.07%