Has somebody experience cell culture contamination using media that contains 1X antibiotic-antimicotic from GIBCO. I have used this product for years, however, recently, I have many issues of contamination, and looking at all the components in the medium, I concluded that the contamination came from the anti-anti itself, as crazy as it may sound, who would thought that something would grow on it. So I add anti-anti from the current bottle that we are using to a TCP, and prepared another plate with anti-anti from a brand-new bottle of the same lot of anti-anti. Observed both under the microscope and saw many impurities floating on it. This even after 30 min of warming up of the anti-anti to prevent precipitations. I incubate both in the incubator for 72 h, and observed further expansion of the floaters in both plates. As control, I did the same just with DMEM/F12, and did not observed any floaters.
I am bringing this to the forum so people observing contamination in the cell culture can be aware of possible contaminations coming from what suppose to prevent it.
Luis: People trust commercial sources for tissue culture components and mix them without further filtering. We avoided the potential contamination problem by using powder base medium and other gradients (without anti-anti) and filtering the mixture prior to feeding cells. Never had problem.
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