don't underestimate the importance of cell adhesion

Hard to believe: same cells, same media, same time point following seeding. Cell adhesion is highly underrated when it comes to serum-free cell culture.

If you’re culturing cells in FBS-containing media, you’ve probably thought very little about adhesion and spreading because the development of TC-treated plastic in the 1960s became the infrastructure for serum-containing cell culture.

If you’ve tried to move to chemically defined media, you may have seen something like images A or B and thought “wow, this serum-free media is awful”.

This is not a faulty chemically defined media (see panels C and D for proof!) This is what an adhesion problem looks like.

These are MCF-7; an epithelial line which is notoriously finicky when it comes to attachment and spreading in serum-free media. Fix the adhesion problem, and you'll see the serum-free media is providing the nutrition this line needs to grow happily in fully chemically defined, animal-free conditions.

This is why we developed and validated adhesion reagents alongside FRS Pioneer, which include a chemically defined adhesion mix as well as recombinant vitronectin.

Now, typically the serum-free media world relies on coating plates with adhesion protein because the world doesn't yet have the infrastructure-equivalent of the TC-treated plate for serum-free media.

However, if you currently coat your plates....and you'd like to be able to skip this step, plus reduce the adhesion proteins you’re using by 90%+ and still get really nice adhesion.......talk to me. We have something new you’ll want to try.

If you’re curious:
A: No pre-coating
B: Pre-coating with laminin
C: Pre-coating with optimised blend of fibronectin and vitronectin (Media City Scientific GECKO)
D: Pre-coating with 10% FBS-containing media (adhesion control).

Surfaces were coated with protein diluted in PBS-/-, 1hr incubation at 37 degrees. Remove coat, plate cells in media supplemented with 10% FRS Pioneer.