Cell Biology Services

MDS maintains over 14 years of experience in providing cell cultures for high throughput screens (HTS) and in developing cell-based assays. We have state of the art downstream processing, analytical and assay development capabilities.

MDS offers you a complete solution to scale-up your cell culture process. We have thorough Quality Control release criteria for cell lines and offer a range of QC tests, either using routine test procedures or products approved by regulatory authorities. A selected list of our test systems follows:

Custom Bulk Production of Cell Reagents for HTS:

• Scale-up
• Cell pellets, sub-cellular fractions, plasma membranes
• Scale-up of adherent cells using Cell Factories and Cell Bioreactor
• Rapid 3-week turnaround for gram quantities of membrane preparations
• Experience with the receptors from all major types expressed in CHO, HEK, HeLa and several other cell lines
• Bulk production of secretory cellular proteins from adherent monolayers (closed-loop perfusion cell bioreactor)
• Generating membrane from scale-up of adherent cells

Contract Research Services

• Customized project planning
• Proposal development
• Experimental design
• Project implementation
• Consulting
• Testing Data analysis

• Mycoplasma detection by three methods (PCR, Hoechst DNA stain and Microbiological culture)
  
  
• Sterility testing
  
  
• Testing for human pathogens

Testing for adventitious agents (in vitro) - using three susceptible cell lines

Three to five susceptible indicator cell lines are cultured in triplicate. One group of the cultures is infected with a range of control viruses. A second group is left untreated as negative controls. The remainder is inoculated with the 'Test' cell line. All the cultures are subsequently examined for cytopathic effects and hemadsorption.

Testing for BVDV by RT-PCR:

BVDV is a common contaminant of bovine serum used in cell culture. The virus is detected using reverse transcriptase coupled with PCR (RT-PCR). The whole test can be carried out in a single day and gives clear positive/negative results.

Mycoplasma and/or bacteria eradication service

Electron microscopy

Pelleted cell lines are chemically fixed, embedded in epoxy resin and thin-sections are prepared. A minimum of fifty cell sections from each cell line are examined for the presence of viral particles at 5,000 X-50,000 X magnification in a transmission electron microscope.

Submission of Samples: Samples for testing can be submitted as either a growing culture or a frozen ampoule. Please complete Sample Submission Form H.