Cell Culture

Question 1

Define cell culture

Answer 1

Removing cells from an organism and their growth in a favourable artificial lab environment

Question 2

What does cell culture allow

Answer 2

Allows the study of cellular behaviours, interactions and function under conditions that replicate the ones in the organism

Question 3

What and when did Ross g Harrison do

Answer 3

Demonstrated the viability of growing animal tissues outside of an organism using frog embryos

Question 4

What are the three cell type classifications for cell culture

Answer 4

• Primary cells
• transformed cells
• stem cells

Question 5

Describe primary cells

Answer 5

• Cells isolated from living tissues and have finite live span in cell culture (finite means when they lose ability to proliferate after a number of cell divisions)
• divide a limited number of times and can only be maintained in vitro for limited amount of time. Known as hayflick limit
• senescence (cell ages and stops dividing) due to shortening of telomere length with each division

Question 6

Describe transformed cells

Answer 6

• Taken from clinical tumors and transforming primary cells.
• They are immortalised or continuous cell lines and can be propagated indefinitely
• useful for long term research as can escape normal cell cycle and grow indefinitely
• tumor cells are taken from clinical tumors but can also be transformed via chemical treatments or viral oncogenes

Question 7

Describe stem cells

Answer 7

Taken from feral tissue, adult tissue, embryonic tissue, and induced pluripotent stem cells. They can self renew and differentiate into various cell types

Question 8

What are the advantages of primary cells

Answer 8

• represent the best experimental models for in vivo situations
• same karyotype as parent tissue

Question 9

Disadvantage of primary cells

Answer 9

• difficult to obtain
• short life span in culture
• variantions in population and between preparations

Question 10

Advantages of transforming cells

Answer 10

• easy to maintain in culture
• easy to obtain large population in culture
• easy to manipulate gene expression

Question 11

Disadvantage of transformed cells

Answer 11

• more aggressive the cell lines the more it changes over time
• not clear how function of cells relate to other cells