Bill: Ampicillin is a broad antibiotics against bacterial growth thus preventing potential bacterial contamination in the culture of mammalian cells. It is not a necessary but harmless agent for the growth of cultured cells, unless of course, you can absolutely avoid bacterial contamination by other means which is next to none. Hope this answered your question.

Can you please explain more the aim of your question?

Adding antibiotics is only necessary to reduce the frequency of infection. Usually people use penicillin/streptomycin mix. If you can be careful and perfectly follow a strict antiseptic technique to avoid infection without using any antibiotic this is perfect. That is the recommendation and that is what I am personally doing for years. I only use antibiotic when I am doing long term experiment where it will be a big loss if a mistake happened.

I am not sure why you are asking specifically about ampicillin.

Bill: Ampicillin is a broad antibiotics against bacterial growth thus preventing potential bacterial contamination in the culture of mammalian cells. It is not a necessary but harmless agent for the growth of cultured cells, unless of course, you can absolutely avoid bacterial contamination by other means which is next to none. Hope this answered your question.

In cell culture, ampicillin act as

-an antibacterial agent

-as a selection agent to select transformed i.e. cells that are only resistant to ampicillin remain alive

Many common vectors carry genes encoding resistance to ampicillin and are identified by the ability of the host to grow in the presence of this antibiotic. This resistance is mediated by cleavage of β-lactam ring of ampicillin by β-lactamase. Ampicillin inhibits bacterial cell-wall synthesis (peptidoglycan cross-linking) by inactivating transpeptidases on the inner surface of the bacterial cell membrane. Thus ampicillin as an antibiotic provides sterility in cell culture. Hope this helps.

It is an interesting question. The use of antibiotics seems to be depended upon the each of research laboratory. Thus, I have used the streptomycin and kanamycin at the National Research Institute for Child Health and Development, Tokyo, Japan (please see file; HepG2 fucoidan). But, penicillin G and streptomycin have been used at Gunma University, Maebashi, Gunma, Japan (please see file; JCB Fucoidan transport).

In order to prevent the fungal contamination, I have further added the Amphotericin B in a recent report of "JCB Fucoidan transport".

The addition of penicillin G (produced in 1942) in cell culture has been depended on the finding of Sir Alexander Fleming (UK) that penicillin can kill bacteria with cell wall (not spore form and Mycoplasma), but resistance to such killing drug is easily occur. Now that fucoidan (sulphated poly-fucose) has been proven to be effective to virus (please see file; Fucoidan HIV-1) and bacteria (please see file; Sargassum Fuco Vibrio), I think that the addition of fucoidan (0.1 mg/mL) instead of antibiotics such as penicillin G in culture medium will be performed near future.

In order to avoid bacterial contamination ampicillin is added in culture media, however mostly people use PS penicillin + streptomycin. I prefer not to add antibiotic, better to use at concentration that doesn't harm the cell line.

Regards

Ampicillin is a broad antibiotics against bacterial growth.And we want to get infection free cells from the culture.....It is added to the culture for the best survival of culturing cells during our experiment.

got it about ampicillin but may i know dear all Researcher can anyone tell me what about fungal contamination almost its happen even though you did your experiment very well but suddenly some time fungal contamination occur how can i avoid it. Thanks

Regards

If your vector has ampR gene that codes for b-lactamase, then you'd add ampicillin to screen positives. Other reason is, amp is a broad range bacteriostatic antibiotic, which discourages contaminating bacteria from growing. That's a brief answer, hope it helps. All the best.