Cell culture is a cornerstone of in vitro biological research. Whilst glassware was
once commonplace in tissue culture facilities, in recent decades laboratories have
moved towards a heavy reliance on single use plastics for routine procedures.
Single use plastics allow for accessible, sterile, and often affordable equipment that
comes ...
Cell culture is a cornerstone of in vitro biological research. Whilst glassware was
once commonplace in tissue culture facilities, in recent decades laboratories have
moved towards a heavy reliance on single use plastics for routine procedures.
Single use plastics allow for accessible, sterile, and often affordable equipment that
comes at a high environmental cost. We developed a glassware preparation and
cleaning process that allowed the comparison of “traditional” plastic-heavy, and
adapted “sustainable,” cell culture practices, to empirically compare the sterility,
viability, and proliferative capacity of cells cultured with differing techniques, by
observing IL-6 production, morphology, and proliferation rate of cultured human
pulmonary fibroblast cells. During which, we calculated the carbon footprint of
traditional versus sustainable methods. We additionally endeavored to provide
a realistic overview of the steps required to transition to more sustainable cell
culture practices and make suggestions to ease the cost, labor, and time required
to uptake similar practices in other laboratories. Cells cultured using reusable
glassware did not show signs of contamination or stress compared to cells grown
solely with plasticware, and glassware baked at 180°C for 120 min was sufficiently
decontaminated and depyrogenated for culturing these cells. An individual researcher
adopting the same methodology could reduce their carbon footprint by 105.92 kg
of Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) whilst also saving money (£408.78) over a
10-year period. We predict that these benefits would be greater if more researchers
were to uptake these adapted practices. We intend for this paper to reassure
researchers that viable, sterile, and sustainable routine cell culture can be achieved
with little upfront cost to the researcher, with the prospective benefit of greatly
reducing the cost to the environment. We additionally hope that increased uptake,
and thus demand of more sustainable practices, encourages suppliers, policy
makers, and funding bodies to make sustainable practices more accessible to
individual researchers and institutions worldwide.
