How to pick up stably transfected colony

[D. KIM]

Another way to do this is to drain the flask and then gently wipe a colony
with a sterile Q-tip (cotton-tipped wooden rod) soaked with Trypsin-EDTA
solution.  After a bit, place the cotton tip into a well or flask with
medium plus serum.  Enough cells are stuck to the cotton to recover.

Daniel kim
dkim at nmsu.edu

Ian A. York <iayork at panix.com> wrote:
: In article <743ds7$j8n$1 at unix2.glink.net.hk>,
: Andrew Leung <leungkc at glink.net.hk> wrote:
: >
: >    This is the first time I transfect cells. I just wonder in what way a
: >single colony in a culture flask could be picked up manually to proprogate.

: If you've got them in flasks, then you're going to have a hard time
: picking individual colonies by cloning rings--you need petri dishes for
: that, unless you have very delicate fine motor control and a pipetter that
: goes around corners.

: A solution that's almost as good is to do clonal dilution.  Take all the
: cells from the flasks, run serial dilutions, plate them into 96-well
: plates (suitable for tissue culture, of course) at, say, 30, 10, 3 , 1,
: 0.3, 0.1 cells per well.  One of those plates should have colonies growing
: in around 1 well in three.  (In theory, you only need to do the 0.3
: dilution, but counting is imprecise enough that it's a good idea to do a
: range.)

: Where the colonies are growing at 1/3 or less, then you can be almost
: certain that each one is a clone.  Amplify it and off you go.

: Ian 
: -- 
:     Ian York   (iayork at panix.com)  <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
:     "-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
:      very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England