I am culturing an adherent cell in a 6-well plate. Unfortunately, one of the well got contaminated. Now, I need to change the media, and I just afraid while doing so the contamination get into other wells as well.
ideally contamination should not spread to other wells unless media is not contaminated. I encounter such problems but if you take care it won't spread to other wells.
Depends on whether it's bacterial or fungal infection, really: fungal infections are usually containable if you're careful, but bacterial infections can generate infectious aerosols incredibly easily.
Carefully remove the media from that well, making sure not to let the pipette tip even hover or come anywhere near the other wells, and dump the media directly into virkon. Leave the well dry and empty.
Then ignore that well forever, and just work around it. Store that plate in a separate part of the incubator from any other plates (just in case). If contamination spreads, ditch the entire plate.
Basically: do it carefully, and if it works, it works. If it doesn't, at least you tried.
Dear Vijay and John,
The cell sample was hard work of 7 days, so did not want to lose it.
I changed the media carefully, and there is no contamination in other wells.
Thank you.
Sailesh
Sailesh, in my experience if one well is contaminated you are better served to assume all wells are contaminated and get rid of the entire plate. Start with fresh cells and reagents. While it may appear that you do not have contamination in some of your wells I would not trust cells on a plate where even a single well is contaminated.
My biggest concern would not be the loss of 7 days of work, but instead would be whether or not the data derived from potentially contaminated cells is valid. While you think you may be saving yourself time, you may actually be causing more problems down the line if your results don't repeat or worse, you have to retract your findings because no one else can repeat them. Just some words of wisdom.
All that being said, if for some very compelling reason you need to save your cells from contamination I would begin a decontamination regimen as soon as possible.
Best.
Dear Ricardo,
Thank you for your suggestion.
I will consider it in coming days, and I have started culturing new cells.
Thanks
I have the same problem and apparently the other wells are good. I have removed the media from the contaminated wells and the others are already good.
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