Only from a materials engineering standpoint, yes sure.

In microscopic images, any non-uniformity in the sample images is considered as an anomaly and contamination. For example, in the synthesis of nanomaterials, in the case of a particular material based on experiences and studies, you know that most of your synthesized particles have spherical morphology. After imaging, you may see that a few particles are scattered in bars. This can be a sign of contamination of your sample. Check the process.

I would like to give my opinion on this. Based on the size itself, it is probably not any prokaryote or eukaryote cell. Yes, it could be a colony of those, but if contamination of live culture does present, it will be fully cloudy, making it really difficult to see your target cells. By naked eyes, you can already tell whether there is contamination by judging your culture media's transparency. I have seen fungal contamination containing hyphae before and it was nothing like what you showed.

Perhaps as you mentioned, it could be crystal because crystal does spontaneously grow although I do not know in what condition it does.

Win Sen Heng yes, I agree that the media does not show any signs of contamination. I really wish I could find out what these things are

Hi!

I'm not sure about it, but it seems to be some kind of crystal.

I usually treat my cultures with ciprofloxacin. Sometimes it get concentrated and we can find some crystals between cells.

So, maybe it's a crystal of something you are putting there.

Hope this helps

Felipe G. Nishimura It's definitely some kind of crystal. I saw one grow right before my eyes today. It's very strange nonetheless

Hello, have you figured out the issue? I started seeing these structures in my cell culture recently. I've worked with cell culture for many years and haven't seen anything like it before. In my case it apparently comes from plastic plates and is present in the 6-well and 24-well plates even before I add any liquid. It looks exactly as the picture you show. I think changing the plastic batch should solve the problem. It doesn't seem to affect cell health luckily!

Evdokiia Potolitsyna

I never figured out exactly what they were, but they disappeared after a while. It was definitely not a living contaminant. My initial guess was that something was crystallizing out from the serum in my media, but plastic makes more sense I think, considering that they appeared suddenly and later vanished. Perhaps I finished the bad batch of plates without linking it to the presence/absence of crystals!

Funny, if I knew exactly what they were I'd write some small technical paper about it 😆