Abstract:
With the expanding scale, efficiency and safety requirements during mammalian cell culture in biomedical industry and research of life sciences, development of serum-free media (SFM) has become a major task in the field of cell engineering. The technology of SFM has experienced four stages including no serum source, no animal source, no proteins and chemically defined medium, and now reached to a status where SFM has more clear components and is easy-handling, allowing users to avoid the potential contaminants of pathogens from environment during cell culture, therefore, to bring a splendid progress and wide applications in the fundamental research of life sciences and bio-pharmaceutical industry. In this review, the classification, components and optimization of SFM were summarized, and latest applications in biological products, stem cells and cancer researches were briefly discussed. This will be helpful for the exploration of SFM in the research of biology, especially in the aspect of tumor stem cells.
