(no subject)
Here's something I posted on useless_facts, but I thought I'd share here, too. I used to work with a line of cultured catfish B cells (the ones that secrete antibodies).
The channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) is the only animal that has immortal cell culture lines that are non-transformed.
Transformed cells are animal cells which can grow indefinitely, unlike normal cells, due to viral or cancerous disruptions in cell-cycle regulation programs within the cell. Healthy cells grow slower and are told to stop when the cell gets some mutations, or when there are too many cells and they start to touch, or there are no longer pro-growth hormones in their environment.
Examples of transformed cell lines are HeLa or CHO cell lines, which are cultures of cells (human cells, usually from biopsies or tumor removal) that can grow outside the animal from whence they came without all the usual stimuli. However, these transformed cells eventually mutate enough of their genes that they either die, or mutate the proteins in the cells that are being researched.
What's really cool about the catfish cell lines is that they grow infinitely just becasue someone accidentally put them in the incorrect growth media. These cells can grow for decades without mutating their genome.
Source: being a student in a catfish immunology lab for four years.
The channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) is the only animal that has immortal cell culture lines that are non-transformed.
Transformed cells are animal cells which can grow indefinitely, unlike normal cells, due to viral or cancerous disruptions in cell-cycle regulation programs within the cell. Healthy cells grow slower and are told to stop when the cell gets some mutations, or when there are too many cells and they start to touch, or there are no longer pro-growth hormones in their environment.
Examples of transformed cell lines are HeLa or CHO cell lines, which are cultures of cells (human cells, usually from biopsies or tumor removal) that can grow outside the animal from whence they came without all the usual stimuli. However, these transformed cells eventually mutate enough of their genes that they either die, or mutate the proteins in the cells that are being researched.
What's really cool about the catfish cell lines is that they grow infinitely just becasue someone accidentally put them in the incorrect growth media. These cells can grow for decades without mutating their genome.
Source: being a student in a catfish immunology lab for four years.