What is the purpose of tissues culturing?

Question

cloning

Answer 1

You can grow cells in a plate for experimentation (in vitro).  You can grow numerous type of cell Hela cells (cancer cells from a woman who died in the '50s), endothelium, fibroblast, etc...

This is used commonly for experiments and is important in biomedical research.

Answer 2

Tissue Culture and Cloning are different processes.

Tissue Culture (or Cell Culture) is where you take cells and grow them in nutrient media the lab, outside the organism from which they came. You can grow many cell types from many different organisms, but different organisms and different cell types require grown in different ways. Plant cell culture uses different nutrient media from insect cell culture, and different again from mammalian cell culture.

When you grow cells, you do so in a spacial growth medium. Mammalian cell culture contains vitamins, salts (to make it isotonic with the cells), and a buffer (to regulate the pH) - and is usually supplemented with serum (an extract of blood, containing many different growth factors which keep the cells "happy"). The buffer used most often is sodium bicarbonate, and the cells are grown at 37oC in an atmosphere of 4% CO2: the CO2 dissolves in the medium to make carbonic acid, which combines with the bicarbonate to perform the buffering action. All of this is performed under sterile conditions to prevent the cultures being infected with bacteria, fungi, etc.

You can grow cells that are freshly-isolated from an organism (this is called "Primary Cell Culture) - like liver cells, fibroblasts, endothelial cells, etc. Unfortunately, most primary cells will only divide a few times in culture (this is the "Hayflick Limit"), so for long-term studies you need a "transformed cell line". Transformed cells will continue to divide indefinitely - cancer cells are an example of such cells.

Growing (for example) liver cells allows you to test liver functions, and the responses of the cells to different drugs and conditions - which can give you a clue to the possibility of using the drugs in medical situations.

Cloning is the process of producing exact copies of something. So you can clone a DNA sequence to make lots of copies of it, or you can clone a single cell to produce copies of it (useful for making antibodies of a specific type, by cloning immune cells). Or you can clone an animal - like Dolly the Sheep.

Animal cloning is currently performed by a process called SCNT ("Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer"), which is where you extract the nucleus from a fertilised ovum, and replace it with the nucleus from a cell from the animal to be cloned. This means the resulting embryo is genetically identical (ie - is a clone) to the animal from which the cell was removed. If the ovum is then transplanted into the uterus of another female animal, it will grow and become a baby animal which is a clone.