Appearances Can Deceive, Even With Standard Reagents

摘要

Culturing immortalized human cell lines for microRNA studies had been a routine procedure in Xi Jianzhong's lab at Peking University. Then last June, something went wrong. Time after time, black spots appeared in the flasks and the cells died within a week. Xi, a biomedical engineer, spent the rest of 2008 trying to figure out why his team's experiments were failing. He finally got a tip that a cell growth medium his lab was using-Dulbecco's Modified Eagle Medium (DMEM)-might be bogus. "DMEM is so basic that we never suspected it could have problems," says Xi. Sure enough, after obtaining a fresh batch from a well-known distributor, the cell lines grew without a hitch.