Cell culture was first successfully undertaken by Ross Harrison in 1907.

Roux in 1885 for the first time maintained embryonic chick cells in a cell culture. The historical development and methods of cell culture are closely interrelated to those of tissue culture and organ culture. Animal cell culture became a common laboratory technique in the mid-1900s,[1] but the concept of maintaining live cell lines separated from their original tissue source was discovered in the 19th century. The 19th-century English physiologist Sydney Ringer developed salt solutions containing the chlorides of sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium suitable for maintaining the beating of an isolated animal heart outside of the body.In 1885 Wilhelm Roux removed a portion of the medullary plate of an embryonic chicken and maintained it in a warm saline solution for several days, establishing the principle of tissue culture. Ross Granville Harrison, working at Johns Hopkins Medical School and then at Yale University, published results of his experiments from 1907–1910, establishing the methodology of tissue culture.

Cell culture techniques were advanced significantly in the 1940s and 1950s to support research in virology. Growing viruses in cell cultures allowed preparation of purified viruses for the manufacture of vaccines. The Salk polio vaccine was one of the first products mass-produced using cell culture techniques.This vaccine was made possible by the cell culture research of John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins, who were awarded a Nobel Prize for their discovery of a method of growing the virus in monkey kidney cell cultures. Historical events in the development of cell culture

  • 1878: Claude Bernard proposed that physiological systems of an organism can be maintained in a living system after the death of an organism.
  • 1903: Jolly observed cell division of salamander leucocytes in vitro.

  • 1907: Harrison cultivated frog nerve cells in a lymph clot held by the 'hanging drop' method and observed the growth of nerve fibers in vitro for several weeks. Production of commercial proteins, large scale production of viruses for use in vaccine production e. g. polio, rabies, chicken pox, hepatitis B & measles.
  • Gene therapy Cells having a functional gene can be replaced to cells which are having non-functional gene.
  • Mass culture of animal cell lines is fundamental to the manufacture of viral vaccines and many products of biotechnology.

    Biological products or the use of adjuvants.

Tissue culture In vitro cultivation of organs, tissues & cells at defined temperature using an incubator & supplemented with a medium containing cell nutrients & growth factors is collectively known as tissue culture.Different types of cell grown in culture includes connective tissue elements such as fibroblasts, skeletal tissue, cardiac, epithelial tissue (liver, breast, skin, kidney) and many different types of tumor cells. Types Of Tissue Culture There are three main methods of initiating a culture ? Organ culture ? Primary explant culture and ? Cell culture Organ culture: Organ culture implies that the architecture, characteristics of the tissue in vivo, is retained at least in part, in the culture. Towards this end, the tissue is cultured at the liquid-gas interface (gel, grid, etc.

), which favors the retention of a spherical or three dimensional shape.Primary explant culture: In primary exaplant culture, a fragment of tissue is placed at a glass-liquid interface. Where following attachment migration is promoted in the plane of the solid substrate. Cell culture: Cell culture implies that the tissue, or outgrowth from the primary explant, is dispersed (mechanically or enzymatically) into a cell suspension, which may then be cultured as an adherent manslayer on a solid substrate or as a suspension in the culture medium. [pic] Fig.

Epithelial cells in culture, stained for keratin (red) and DNA (green)