A Bug’s Life
11 February 2022
Cells are the fundamental unit of life, and there are many different types of cells found across different biological niches. It can be complicated to artificially reproduce these growth conditions inside flasks or test tubes, and culturing bacterial cells is a very different proposition than growing eukaryotic cells… or is it?
Yes in theory bacteria cells (“bugs”) are less susceptible to infection than mammalian cells, but this is no reason to be careless. Given how readily bacteria can incorporate foreign DNA into their genomes, in some ways their genetic makeup is even more fragile than mammalian cells.
Bacteria have much greater metabolic diversity than mammalian cells, so they can grow in different conditions at a much faster rate. Nutrient media for bacterial cultures is usually much cheaper than media for mammalian cell culture – depending on the cell types you’re comparing, it can be up to 100 times cheaper to grow an equivalent concentration of bacterial cells compared to mammalian cells.
This is the conclusion to our 3-part video series on Cell & Tissue Culture. In Part 3, we cover the differences and similarities between culturing bacterial and mammalian cells, as well as the cell counting assays that we can use to monitor and control the growth of either of these cell types.
