Overview
Who said spheroids were hard to grow and use? The SpheroTribe kit is meant to facilitate life with spheroids. No matter the cells you are working with, you can form compact and uniform spheroids. You can also use it to handle any spheroid like a charm.
Once diluted in your culture medium of choice, our concentrated polymer-based solution promotes the formation and maintenance of circular 3D spheroids with an increased control over their size and shape. Combined with the 96-well round bottom plates and the large opening pipette tips provided in our kit, you have everything in hand to perform long-term routine culture of spheroids. Or to simply recover your spheroids from your plate and gently
isolate them for your desired downstream assays.
SpheroTribe is great to boost spheroid formation, notably for cells that are difficult to aggregate, or to increase the reproducibility of your functional assays, drug screening studies or in vivo implantation experiments.
SpheroTribe is compatible with any cell, any medium and any assay. It is easily washed away to perform downstream assays.
A technology designed by
Thomas Daubon
and published in JoVE Journal
Images
Uniform patient-derived glioblastoma spheroids generated using the SpheroTribe kit and visible by the naked eye after 4 days of culture
Formation of compact and unique human glioblastoma spheroids using SpheroTribe 
Patient-derived glioblastoma spheroid formed with SpheroTribe invading a 3D collagen-I matrix
Immune infiltration of B16F10 spheroids after immune checkpoint blockade
SpheroTribe promotes and maintains cell aggregation in COS-7 monkey kidney fibroblast-like cells
SpheroTribe promotes and maintains cell aggregation in HeLa cells
Features
Uniformity
Get spheroids of consistent size and circularity for greater reproducibility
Compactness
by increasing cell aggregation, SpheroTribe favors the formation and maintenance of
easy-to-handle
spheroids
Biocompatible
Composed of a biologically inert polymer, the solution will not affect your cell physiology, neither interfere with biological responses and can be washed away for downstream assays
Universality
made up in a serum-free basal medium, the SpheroTribe solution can be used with any cell type and culture medium. It is compatible with addition of serum, antibiotics or supplements
Consistency
rigorous fabrication process
ensuring batch-to-batch reproducibility
Easy-to-use
all you need is some cells
and your final culture medium
Protocol
Resuspend cells
in your desired culture media added with SpheroTribe concentrate
Seed your cell
suspension into the provided 96-well plates
Your spheroids grow
just wait & watch
Handle them
easily with the large opening pipette tips
Technical information
Read the Safety Datasheet.
1 kit includes:
- 25mL of 5X methylcellulose solution
- 10x U-bottom 96-well plates
- 2x racks of 96 pipette tips with a large opening of 200µL
Tested and validated on (cell types): patient-derived GB P3 and BL13 cells (stem-like glioblastoma), U87 (human glioblastoma), HeLa, HMV-II (human vaginal mucosal melanoma), human colorectal cancer cells, COS-7 (monkey kidney fibroblast-like cell line), primary neurons from rat embryos (E18) & murine melanoma cells.
Applications
:
Collect your spheroid for downstream analysis with the large-opening pipette tip
Story
It all started in Bergen in the 2010s. I worked in the laboratory of Professor Rolf Bjerkvig, a precursor to the three-dimensional modelling of glioblastoma. When I returned to France, I wanted to import this technique and standardize it for cells that spontaneously grew into spheroids. We improved the Norwegian technique thanks to one discovery and one search: a viscous medium that we developed, and specific 96-well plates we found. But if the experiments became easy, taking the spheroids was less so. We pipetted with collagen, it was dirty and painful. Then we imagined cutting P200 cones to modify their tips. This allowed us to automatize everything and rely on a precise protocol to the point that when Agathe and Victor, from Idylle, came to the lab in Bordeaux for the first time, Agathe succeeded in the manipulation the first time. Despite this success, how many times have we had to do remote piloting for colleagues who were filming their movements in their lab! We needed a partner to standardize the protocol too. We were ripe for a collaboration with Idylle! Their entire team was very excited about our technology. The adventure together was so fast that I didn't have time to realize it had started that the transfer was already real and our technology had turned into SpheroTribe!
At first, we were all touched by Thomas's desire to share his discovery. Quickly, we were also fascinated by his level of investment and organization to carry out our common project. As an example, I was amazed by one fact: the day we arrived in his laboratory to show us the SpheroTribe protocol, we realized that he had been preparing spheroid plates just for us for 3 days. We just had to take them in hand, it was fantastic! This example is a good illustration of the relationship of trust between us, and I thank him here publicly for that!
Combining SpheroTribe
Stampwell V-shape
Transfer your spheroids cultured with SpheroTribe into V-shaped microwells for optimized imaging.
AgarSqueezer
to assess how mechanical forces affect your spheroids under compression.
Contact us about the compact and uniform spheroids you'd love to get!
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