Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) has been the serum of choice for cell and tissue culture from the beginning. While FBS is an excellent product for many applications, it is subject to shortages and consequently price fluctuations and availability difficulties. As an alternative, HyClone has introduced Bovine Calf Serum to the market in various forms. These calf serum products provide advantages in availability, price, and consistency of performance. In 1984 we were the first to introduce Iron-Supplemented Bovine Calf Serum. Since then, we have introduced other supplemented and processed calf serum products including Alpha Calf Serum, Cosmic Calf Serum, FetalClone I, II, and III, and most recently, Bovine Growth Serum. To demonstrate the ability of these products to perform as well as FBS in many applications, we provide data comparing FBS to these products along with comparisons of non-US sourced FBS to US sourced FBS.

The following growth promotion studies were performed in the R&D department at HyClone Laboratories, Inc. HyClone’s non-US sourced FBS as well as its fetal bovine serum replacements were compared to a US sourced FBS control for their ability to promote culture growth in a variety of popular cell lines. All cultures were grown in T-25 cell culture flasks using 10 ml of appropriate media supplemented with 10% serum and checked daily for confluency. Performance was normalized to the FBS control by dividing the cell count from each FBS alternative condition by the cell count from the FBS control. The resulting ratios presented as relative yields in each study. The ratio, or relative yield, of FBS is always 1.0. Conditions that produce more cells than the control have values greater than 1.0.

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