Labster Logo

Mammalian cell growth

The growth of cells in culture has 3 phases: the lag phase, where cells are accustoming to the new environment after seeding; then the log phase, where the cells proliferate exponentially; and finally the stationary phase, where cell proliferation is greatly reduced or ceases entirely due to space requirements or lack of nutrients.

This is a graph that represents cell density on the Y-axis and days on the X-axis. At 0 days the lag phase starts and the cell density is around ten to the fourth. On day 3, the lag phase ends and the log phase starts. The cell density starts to increase. On day 8, the log phase ends and the cell density grew exponentially until reaching a value of ten to the sixth. The stationary phase starts and the cell density reaches a plateau until day 10.

Figure 1: Typical growth pattern of cultured cells.

The study of the cell growth curve in every cell line is essential not only to have a record of your cell culture growth but also to detect growth anomalies possibly related to contamination and to establish your cell line doubling time