Basic Lab Procedures: Intro and Medium Preparation

I'll be uploading various procedures that I encounter during my internship for future reference and for anyone interested. This is the first of its series. I cannot guarantee that these posts will be in logical order, but these procedures are all very basic so the order might not be a big issue.

Medium Preparation

Culture Medium is a liquid or solidified nutrient material suitable for the cultivation of microorganisms

Different cells or bacteria need different kinds of media, and there are certain guidelines that different media should follow. I have not learned so much about them yet, so I will later post another, more in-depth post about media.

For now I will focus on the most basic kind of media used in MIRM lab, the Knock Out Media.

I can't really say this is much of a tutorial or anything, but its the first one, so i see no harm ;)

What You Need: (to prepare 50ml of KO media)

5ml of FBS
500ul of glutaMAX
250 ul of penstrep
45ml of Knock Out Media

In my lab, you can find them here :D
in the 4 'C fridge in the culture room.








Adding 5ml of FBS makes it a 10% FBS KO solution be sure to write that one the bottle.
Oh, and here's what you need to write on the bottle:
KO media - the name of the solution
+10% FBS - what is in the solution
+glutaMAX
+penstrep
0x/0x/0x -the date it was prepared
ASC - name of the group

Now here's a brief explanation of what FBS, glutamax and penstrep are:

FBS- FBS stands for Fetal Bovine Serum, is a serum widely used for culturing various kinds of cells as it contains a lot of growth factors and relatively low concentration of antibodies. It is important that during an experiment to keep the FBS from same stock.

GlutaMAX - is a commercial product that improves cell viability and growth, minimizes ammonia build up to keep the cells healthier.

Pen-Strep - is a mixture of Penicillin and Streptomycin used in cell cultures to as an antibiotic.

The media is already there, we just prepare it by adding supplements to provide an optimized environment for the cells.
This is the end product!








Oh, and make sure to keep the media in the water math before using it. 37.4'C