ABSTRACT
The advantages of tissue culture systems are that they provide a continuous supply of homogeneous material, which can be manipulated in many ways, and can be stored frozen; cells are more economical than animals. When studying a bacterial pathogenic determinant with a tissue culture model or animal experiments, the ideal procedure is to find a mutant without the determinant and to test this mutant in the same way as the control. The use of tissue culture cells has also been of interest in studying the cell receptor for Helicobacter pylori. Usually H. pylori adherence has minor macroscopic effects on tissue culture cells. Intracellular vacuolization by the H. pylori cytotoxin and ammonia is a common finding; both agents are capable of inducing lysosomal swelling of cells in vitro. The cytotoxic activity of H. pylori broth culture filtrates was first detected using a cell culture model.
