Basic Cell Culture

This article will describe the basic techniques required for successful cell culture. It will also act to introduce some of the other chapters in this volume. It is not intended, as this volume is not, to describe the establishment of a tissue culture laboratory, nor to provide a historical or theoretical survey of cell culture. There are several books that adequately cover these areas, including the now somewhat dated but still valuable volume by Paul (1 ), the multi-authored Methods in Enzymology volume edited by Jakoby and Pastan (2 ), and the new edition of Freshney (3 ). Instead, this chapter’s focus will be on the techniques for establishing primary rodent cell cultures from embryos and adult skin, maintaining and subculturing these fibro-blasts and their transformed derivatives, and the isolation of genetically pure strains. The cells described are all derived from Chinese hamsters since, to date, these cells, have proved to be the most useful for somatic cell genetics (4 ,5 ). The techniques, however, are generally applicable to most fibroblastic cell types.