I'm a graduate student and I have collected cells from cheekswabs of donors. I have them in bronchial epithelial cell growth media in adherent T25 flasks. The cells look healthy even after three weeks of being in the culture. But I'm wondering how these cells are supposed to look when they are in culture.
Most epithelial cells in literature seem to grow adherent and have outgrowths but these buccal cells are still in suspension and are maintaining their original multigon shapes with very small nuclei.
Are they able to expand like this? So far, the number of cells haven't changed very much in the past three weeks...
I also tried coating the flasks with collagen IV, but that did not help adhering the cells.