What is the importance of fetal bovine serum in the laboratory

Fetal bovine serum is a natural medium commonly used in laboratories. It is rich in various nutrients, but it is also easy to carry the virus due to viral infections in cattle, which brings potential interference to cell culture. Therefore, we must not only ensure that the source of pregnant women is healthy and free of various infectious diseases (including no mad cow disease epidemic), slaughterhouses need to be registered with the government, in the quality check of fetal bovine serum, but also to carry out various viral tests to ensure the quality of fetal bovine serum. The batch number of fetal bovine serum ensures that production can be traced.

Fetal bovine serum is when the cow is 5 to 8 months pregnant, the fetal cow is removed, and the heart is punctured to take blood. All devices and websites need to be sterile. Serum collection conditions need to meet the standards of industrial production. After the serum is collected, it is necessary to centrifuge, then leave the upper part, i.e. the serum, and then freeze and store the serum. Under appropriate conditions, serum thawing should be filtered together 7 times, and the membrane pore size should be continuously reduced, and 3 times for 0.1 μm filtration. This filter removes bacteria and mycoplasma.

Fetal bovine serum is of good quality and widely used, and is suitable for cultivating various cancer cell lines, delicate cells, primary cells, stem cells (embryonic stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, etc.).

If you want to say why many cell culture researchers use fetal bovine serum, then we have to say that fetal bovine serum plays an important role.

1. Provide hormones to maintain the growth of the cell index, nutrients with little or no presence in the basal medium, and major low molecular weight nutrients.

2. Provide combination proteins that can identify vitamins, lipids, metals and other hormones, etc., and can bind or regulate the activity of the substances in combination.

3. In some cases, binding proteins can bind to toxic metals and pyrogens to play a detoxifying role.

4. Is the source of the factor required for the spread of cell adherent on the plastic culture medium.

5. It plays a role in buffering pH.

6. Provide protease inhibitors to inactivate the remaining trypsin during cell passage, protecting cells from damage.

Because the fetal cow has not yet been exposed to the outside world, the serum contains few antibodies, complement and other components that are harmful to cells, so the quality of fetal cow serum is very high.

Fetal bovine serum should be extracted from caesarean section fetal cattle; new bovine serum should be extracted from new cattle within 24 hours of birth; calf serum should be extracted from calves born 10-30 days old. Because the fetal cow has not yet been exposed to the outside world, there are fewer harmful components such as antibodies and complement to the cells in the serum, so the serum quality of the fetal cow is higher.