Our lab cultures isolated rat chromaffin cells (from the adrenal medulla). Lately, I've been getting contamination in my cell cultures even though other lab members continue to do the same prep with the same reagents without contamination. I'm not looking for suggestions on the source of the contamination (though I am still completely baffled), but I am curious to know what the contaminant is. See pictures and details below:
Media: DMEM/F12 with 10% Fetal Bovine Serum and Penicillin/Streptomycin/Gentamicin (antibiotics added 3 hours after plating cells)
Appearance: The contaminant appears as variably-sized (~3-5 micrometer diameter) dark, circular spots that are mostly isolated. I'm quite certain that they are cells, because the number of spots increases drastically overnight. It also appears that the 'cells' divide by binary fission (or a similar mechanism) as evidenced by the apparent cleavage furrow (see images).
Green Arrows = Chromaffin Cells (approx. 12-15 micrometer diameter)
Red Arrows = Contaminant
Total magnification is printed in the lower right corner of each image.
possibly yeast contamination, what color is your media? Usually the media will be bright pink (basic) with yeast contamination and yellow (acidic) with bacteria.
Thanks for the response Chris. Unfortunately the media color change has been inconsistent. I am attaching a picture of my plates when I first saw contamination. The plate on the left was contaminated (yellow-ish) and the plate on the right was clean (red-ish) - interestingly these plates were seeded with cells from the same prep.
However, I've done two preps since then, and despite the same degree of contamination, the media has appeared relatively normal. If anything, they were very slightly on the pink side in comparison to my colleagues' plates, but not outside of the color variability that we normally see between preps when there is no contamination.
Because of size and appearance I would also guess it's yeast contamination.
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