Sidebar: Selected Suppliers Of Tools For Cell Culture
Things have changed.
Today's labs are more casual places. Walk into a lab doing cell culture, and you're likely to find jean-clad graduate students joking around and humming along with a CD player perched atop a lab bench. Still, the basic ideas-and needs-driving cell culture haven't changed since Carrel's time. To grow cells in the lab, a scientist needs at least four things: an isolated cell or set of cells to study; a nutritional medium in which those cells can grow; a way to study and track growing cells; and a method for propagating those cells. But today's technology makes it much easier to keep samples sterile.
Companies constantly refine and streamline the tools scientists use to accomplish these basic cell culture steps. For the first task --simply getting the cell to be studied -- researchers often must dissociate a cell from ...
