ABSTRACT
The term cell culture refers to the cultivation of dispersed cells taken from an original tissue, a primary culture, or a cell line. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the practice of cultivating cells started at the beginning of the 20th century and was developed from a simple exploratory phase to an expansion phase in the 1950s. For more than 50 years, the culture of cells derived from primary tissue explants has predominated, justifying the original name ‘‘tissue culture.’’ Currently, cell culture is in a specialization phase. With the increase of the use of dispersed cells since the 1950s, the term tissue culture was substituted by cell culture. At the present time, cell culture techniques allow in vitro propagation of
various cell lines including those from insects, humans, mice, rats, and other mammals. Basically, animal cell culture techniques are similar to those employed for bacteria, fungi, and yeast, although there are some characteristic differences. In general, animal cells are more delicate, vulnerable to mechanical damage, present lower growth rates, and require more complex culture media and special substrates (Augusto and Oliveira, 2001). Moreover, cell culture has to be performed under rigorous aseptic conditions, since animal cells grow more slowly than most usual contaminants, such as bacteria and fungi. The goal of this chapter is to discuss animal cell culture characteristics,
focusing on typical cell structural and morphological aspects, the establishment, maintenance, and storage of cell lines, in vitro cell growth phases, the effects of environmental conditions on cell cultivation, and culture of anchorage-dependent cells, with emphasis on maintaining cell lines employed for the production of commercially attractive biomolecules. Cell cycle phases (G0, G1, S, G2, and M), through which cells pass during exponential growth, are discussed in detail in Chapter 7.
