Detection of inter-species contaminations in a cell line collection using isoenzymes and molecular markers

Abstract

As in human research, also in livestock species the use of continuous cell cultures is an important tool for the study of physiological and tissue developmental processes, as well as for immunological, virological and toxicological assays. This widespread use of animal cell cultures needs that quality control tests are systematically performed in order to evaluate the authenticity of the cells used. Cell cross-contamination (CCC) can occur with cells from other species (interspecies contamination) or with unrelated cells from the same species (intraspecies contamination). Several methods have been used to identify inter- and intraspecies CCC: isoenzyme profile (Nims, 1998), cytogenetic analysis (Macville et al., 1996), DNA fingerprinting (Stacey et al., 1992), and, more recently, PCR-based methods (Matsuo et al., 1999). Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) technology is a PCR-based technique (Vos et al., 1995) able to reveal polymorphism, with no need of prior sequence information or probe isolation..........

Keywords

• animal cell cultures, AFLP markers, cross contamination, species of origin.