Treated glass coverslips for in situ culture of amniotic cells: Better cell adhesion and growth than on plastic

In culturing amniotic cells for antenatal diagnosis, particular attention has been paid to the reduction of culture time to minimise the interval between amniocentesis and termination when results justify the latter. The in situ culture method is now used in many laboratories as an alternative to mass culture techniques, since it is more error-free. The in situ procedure involves the seeding and harvesting of amniotic cells on glass coverslips. It has been shown that the charge density on glass surface is critical for adhesion and growth of mammalian cells. Furthermore, the glass charge density can be increased by a simple procedure. We recently experienced poor growth of some amniotic cell cultures set up according to the in situ technique. The difficulty could be definitely attributed to the coverslips, since concomitant cultures of the same amniotic fluid samples on plastic containers exhibited satisfactory growth. In this note we report the results of 120 consecutive amniotic fluid cell cultures on glass coverslips treated according to their procedure.