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 authoritie. A selected list of our test systems is as 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
- 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 haemadsorption
. 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 5,000X-50,000X 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 forms H.