To achieve the same total yield of antibody as one 1L G-P bag, eighteen 75 cm 2 tissue culture flasks would have to be seeded and incubated. Although the media of choice may be hybridoma dependent, consistent results were obtained using serum-free media with these hybridomas. The hybridomas grew well in serum-free media without prior adaptation. The use of flexible, gas-permeable tissue culture bags is a reasonable alternative to the use of ascitic tumors for monoclonal antibody production. Although adaptable to use with automated seeding and media transfer systems, we were able to manually seed G-P bags easily and inexpensively using a syringe barrel and gravity flow.
Materials required for gas-permeable bag culture are commercially available, as are complete kits.
In addition, as the bags are essentially a closed system after inoculation, risk of bacterial contamination is reduced. In this study, no antibiotics were used in the growth media and contamination was rare even in bags allowed to incubate more than 40 days and sampled on a daily basis. In addition to these technical considerations, the G-P bags can provide an economic advantage. Use of a group-reactive and other monoclonal antibodies in an enzyme immunodot assay for identification and presumptive serotyping of aquatic birnaviruses. Bluetongue virus genome remains stable throughout prolonged infection of cattle.