Applications of Cell Culture - Short Essay

Applications of cell culture
Mass culture of animal cell lines is fundamental to the manufacture of viral vaccines and other products of biotechnology
Biological products produced by recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology in animal cell cultures include enzymes, synthetic hormones, immunobiologicals (monoclonal antibodies, interleukins, lymphokines), and anticancer agents. Although many simpler proteins can be produced using rDNA in bacterial cultures, more complex proteins that are glycosylated (carbohydrate-modified) currently must be made in animal cells. An important example of such a complex protein is the hormone erythropoietin. The cost of growing mammalian cell cultures is high, so research is underway to produce such complex proteins in insect cells or in higher plants, use of single embryonic cell and somatic embryos as a source for direct gene transfer via particle bombardment, transit gene expression and co focal microscopy observation is one of its applications. It also offers to confirm single cell origin of somatic embryos and the asymmetry of the first cell division, which starts the process.
Single cell culture is very important for the fundamental and mutation studies and it has a wide industrial application.
i. Single cell culture can be used successfully to obtain single cell clones. ii. Plants can be regenerated from the callus tissue derived from the single cell clones. iii. The occurrence of high degree of spontaneous variability in the cultured tissue and their exploitation through single cell culture are very important in crop improvement programmes. iv. Isolated single cells can be handled as a microbial system for the treatment of mutagens and for mutant selection. Many cell lines resistant to amino acid analogues, antibiotics, herbicides, fungal toxins etc. have been selected by the simplest method.
v. Single cell culture in large scale could become a valuable technique for industrial production of such and important natural compound. vi. Biotransformation means the cellular conversion of an exogenously supplied substrate compound not available in the cell or the precursor of a particular cellular compound to a new compound to a new compound or the known compounds in higher amounts.