Talk:Fetal bovine serum

Help
This article seems to completely avoid explaining exactly what Fetal Bovine Serum is used for and I find it strange that so much has been sold but it negates letting you know that a small sack sells for something like 300$? That is a hefty amount of money and for what exactly? Can anybody help me?? ~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Orryx (talk • contribs) 01:41, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Question
I know Wikipedia is not a forum, however I have a question (as a biologist) whose answer could possibly be added to this article. Why are cells serum-starved (eg. quite often for 24h) before an experiment? What is the effect of serum that can affect the results and conclusions of an experiment? 155.207.86.45 07:30, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Answer
Depending on your experiment, it would appropriate to serum-starve your cells for two reasons. For one, serum starvation with some cell lines induces morphological changes. CAD cells, upon serum-starvation, differentiate into neuron-like cells. Serum starvation can also induce a stronger response in some assays. For example, some cells would show a stronger response towards growth factors for cell motility assays and growth-factor response assays.

杉村弘樹でした～！ Sugimurahiroki 08:16, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Sugimurakiroki's second point is critical. You can imagine if you are trying to measure the response of a pathway downstream of growth factor receptor signaling, it is easier to measure significant changes when the background signaling is low. Serum is like a "gain" knob on the internal signaling machinery that you can turn down to make your signal come through cleaner.

143.111.84.114 (talk) 00:53, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Spamming Wikipedia
Biologicalworld.com has spammed wikipedia like no tomorrow. He is a site of only a few pages and a LOT of adsense. Not much information is given except for "protocols" which are not referenced, and cannot be trusted from a site of that quality.

check: Links from Wikipedia

The following have been cleaned up:


 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel_electrophoresis
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology)
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protease
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_enzyme
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_dish
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_domain
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypsin
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligonucleotide
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_electron_microscope
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar_plate
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_phosphate
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfide_bond
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturation_(biochemistry)
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_ligase
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_culture
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_electron_microscopy
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporter_gene
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_blot
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_engineering
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_end/blunt_end
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taq_polymerase
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_domain
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coomassie
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_state
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Hamster_Ovary_cell
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptidase
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visking_tubing
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptavidin
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtiter_plate
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcloning
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_exchange_chromatography
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_cycler
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_serum_albumin
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate_buffered_saline
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutathione_S-transferase
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPES
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortholog
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteases
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_out
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteolytic_enzyme
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_end
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatant
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABTS
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conserved_sequence
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_mass_fingerprinting
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithiothreitol
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranyl_acetate

and many more Sciencetalks (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 03:13, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Lack of References/Sources
I noticed that not only is this article relatively short, it also cites no sources.

Works of Sweat (talk) 23:26, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

NPOV
It sounds like this second part of the introductory paragraph was written by someone with an agenda, especially this part:


 * I – ethics Not everyone seems to know how serum is “harvested” and hardly anyone saw pictures from the actual process. This is a reason already to seek an alternative. With a synthetic serum replacement this is of course not the issue.
 * II – production In the actual process of using media there are a lot of advantages by using serum-replacements as the actual content is not known. So the process needs various steps to ensure there are no influences and traces of FBS: some advantages if using synthetic alternatives include: 1. Improved reproducibility of results from different laboratories and over time since variation due to batch change of serum is avoided. 2. Easier downstream processing of products from cultured cells. 3. Toxic effects of serum are avoided 4. Biassays are free from interference due to serum proteins. 5. There is no danger of degradation of sensitive proteins by serum proteases. 6. They permit selective culture of differentiated and producing cell types from the heterogenous cultures.
 * III – science As we do not know what is in FBS we cannot tell what (in a positive or negative result) was the precise benefit of the process or the material used. Or was it due to FBS? With a synthetic replacement we do know, and we can deduct various stable, know factors.

If there is a controversy (I don't know, I'm not an expert), this belongs in a controversy section, not the intro paragraph. Can someone who knows more about the topic than me fix this? --Sbrools ( talk . contribs ) 00:54, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

These I, II, III seem to come out of the blue and indeed should be put elsewhere. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.231.240.145 (talk) 07:03, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Problem with ethics section
The ethics section is inaccurate; either due to laziness or willful misrepresentation, claims are made which are DIRECTLY contrary to a source cited in support of those claims.. I suspect that this section has been written by an 'interested' party. 193.60.82.5 (talk) 14:12, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

This section only describe the negatives to using FBS and non of the positives. To be balanced and unbiased it needs to at least mention both.

I am growing embryonic rat neocortex cultures for my PHD in neurodegenerative medicine. This is the most suitable media for my experiment. Perhaps ill have time in a few weeks to help better the article, but for now it will have to be biased —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.32.8 (talk) 20:36, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

in fact this article seems to be infected by an animal rights activist / a synthetic FBS manufacturer i doubt that it will be a synthetic FBS manufacturer as they would have perhaps written something which makes grammatical and scientific sense... WATCH OUT IF YOU ARE USING THIS PAGE, IT IS NOT ENCYCLOPEDIC

abattoir vs. slaughterhouse
AFAIK, more people are familiar with the term slaughterhouse vs. "abattoir" (which this article uses), so I am once again reverting to "slaughterhouse" because I think this is clearer. Please leave comments here if you think there is a reason to use the "abattoir" term.--Xris0 (talk) 01:53, 28 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Given the lack of negative feedback, I went ahead and axed the "(aka abattoir)" in the intro text. It wasn't particularly encyclopedic, anyway, IMO.  As a compromise, though, I made slaughterhouse a link to the Slaughterhouse page, which has the word abattoir all over it. 03:26, 28 February 2013 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Joehjoeh (talk • contribs)

External links - automated or discretionary?
help me The chart under external links, while pretty, is truly irrelevant. Is this an automated thing like with proteins or genes where it pulls from a public database, or can I remove it at my discretion? Thanks! Joehjoeh (talk) 22:35, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I have to say I don't agree with it being irrelevant. The links are truly what would make up the serum, i.e. all cells that would be left after the coagulation and centrifugion of the blood. Therefore, I think it should stay. gwickwire  talk editing 23:04, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * There are no cells in serum. Plasma is the acellular component of blood, and serum is plasma with clotting factors removed.  In fact, I bet the figure in question would lead to this particular confusion. Although perhaps I'm misunderstanding something.  Assuming you agree with the above, do you think I can delete the figure? Joehjoeh (talk) 00:03, 2 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Pursuant to this discussion, I'm going to remove the figure. Please see gwickwire's talk page for more info.  Thx, Joehjoeh (talk) 20:39, 5 March 2013 (UTC)


 * For posterity, here is what I removed:

Needs overhaul
There is something clearly wrong with the intro. On investigating when the contradictory, weirdly-phrased first two sentences came about, I discovered that it has been a *long time* since the article met any kind of quality standard, grammatical or content-related. I'm going to flag the page for copyediting cleanup, but it likely also needs the attention of a subject matter expert. Perhaps when the copyediting happens (most likely by me; I don't have time right now and would like to flag the page to warn readers) the accuracy and inline quotation issues will also be fixed, but otherwise I'm not sure how to get that attention. This has the potential to be a fairly important page, but even a stub-length article would be better if it were correct. Tranquilled (talk) 19:38, 6 January 2021 (UTC)