A personal commentary on the history and current art of culturing

There are some records of early attempts to maintain BF Trypanosoma brucei in vitro [1, 2], but short-term propagation, in the presence of feeder cells (L-cells), was not achieved until 1967 [3]. Continuous propagation was not reported until 1977, when the Lister 427 strain (clone 052 from GAMC) was successfully propagated in RPMI 1640 medium with 25 mM HEPES and 20% heatinactivated FBS, in the presence of bovine primary fibroblast-like feeder cells [4-6]. This successful result was obtained in an experiment in which 96 permutations of 12 different media, with varying amounts of FBS, ± feeder cells, were tested simultaneously. It initially only worked for the Lister 427 strain.