Cell scraping

I present to you - the cell squeegee! Technically called a cell scraper, these mini windshield wiper looking things help you detach cells from dishes. They tend to kill a bunch of the cells when they do so, however, so you typically only use them when you are killing the cells anyway for your experiment. Such as when you’re lysing (breaking open) the cells to see how much of various proteins are there, etc. We frequently do an “in dish lysis” where, after washing off the media (cell growth food) we drip on some lysis buffer (typically a detergent-containing solution), then scrape the (now broken-open) cells off with the scraper. Depending on how harsh the buffer is detergent-wise, you may then need to do some mechanical lysing too - this can be triturating through a needle (basically stringing up and down to shear things), using some sort of grinder (Dounce homogenizer, etc.), etc.
The scraper is a lot simpler than trypsinizing cells (that enzymatic detachment method I was talking about yesterday) so if you don’t care if the cells survive, it’s a time saver (and fun!). But, if you do care if the cells survive, trypsin/EDTA (or other gentle methods) it typically is…
(I will probably add a page on my blog with links to all my cell culture posts if that would be helpful)
more on how trypsin/EDTA works to break up cell-cell and cell-dish connections here: bit.ly/trypsin... KZbin: • Cell detachment with t...
 
more on HEK293 cells: blog form: bit.ly/hekcells ; KZbin: • HEK 293 cells: types a...   
 
more about culture media: blog: bit.ly/cell_cu... ; KZbin: • Mammalian cell culture...    
more practical lab tips and tricks here: bit.ly/lab_tri...
 
more about all sorts of things: #365DaysOfScience All (with topics listed) 👉 bit.ly/2OllAB0 or search blog: thebumblingbioc...