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8: Culture Maintenance Passaging and Plating

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    222992

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    Maintaining a culture means providing conditions that support cell survival and, when intended, growth while preserving the behavior needed for the work. As cells use nutrients and release waste, their environment changes. Adherent cells may fill the available growth surface, while suspension cells may reach concentrations that limit growth. Regular observation helps you decide when to replace medium, transfer cells, or investigate a problem. This chapter explains how to choose the appropriate maintenance task, handle adherent and suspension cells, and calculate transfers and starting densities. It also shows how follow-up observations and records help you assess the resulting cultures. Completing a transfer does not by itself establish success: the cells must recover and meet the conditions needed for continued maintenance or the planned experiment.

    Learning Objectives
    • After completing this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

      1. Distinguish a medium change, culture dilution, passaging, and experimental plating.

      2. Use density, morphology, viability, and culture history to justify a maintenance decision.

      3. Explain the roles of dissociation reagents and identify handling choices that can reduce recovery.

      4. Calculate suspension transfer volumes and interpret a split ratio in relation to cell number and vessel size.

      5. Plan multiwell plating with defined viable cell numbers, final volumes, controls, and well locations.

      6. Evaluate post-passage growth and document the relationship between source cultures and their descendants.

    This page titled 8: Culture Maintenance Passaging and Plating was last modified on Wed, 21 Oct 2026 01:35:27 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Emalee MacKenzie.