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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2946 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 20, 2023

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You're correct, but it's also just typical biologist-speak. Carrel also didn't literally culture enough cells to create a rooster that could cross the Atlantic in a single stride.

Typically, when the media is exhausted (every several days) you 'pass' the cells and throw out some fraction (from 50-95%). If you pass the cells 1/10 a dozen times and then do the math, if you hadn't killed any cells you'd have some absurd number. Here, they only transfer 10^5 cells to each new mouse and thus discard the vast majority of their T cells when they kill the old mouse, not to mention the fact that most cells will die during the isolation/sorting/transfer procedure.

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