BIOTC 489Animal Cell Culture Methods
The overall goal of this course is to introduce students to basic principles and techniques in animal cell culture. More specifically, the course outlines the importance of animal cell culture to the field of biotechnology as it applies to the pharmaceutical industry. Lecture discussions will be used to provide the necessary theoretical background in working with animal and insect cells, such as history of cell culture, media components, growth kinetics, principles of regulating biological products, cell line propagation, characterization, quality control and the complex issues of scale-up of cell culture from the research bench to larger reactors. Students will become familiar with the practical aspects of culturing and sub-culturing established cell lines and learn basic techniques such as creating a primary cell line, chromosome spreading and mycoplasma detection as well as maintaining insect cells. In addition to hands-on experiments, different methods and equipment employed in the scale-up of animal cell culture will be demonstrated and discussed in the laboratory.