What is it SpheroTribe intended for?

SpheroTribe provides a simple toolkit to generate consistent and robust 3D cell structures. Simply dilute the SpheroTribe solution into your culture medium of choice, watch your cells turn into uniformly sized 3D spheroids and collect them for your downstream assays.

Once diluted in your culture medium of choice, our concentrated polymer-based solution increases the medium viscosity favoring cell-cell contacts. SpheroTribe offers a simple method to generate homogeneous 3D cell structures with increased control over their size and shape, which can be easily handled and washed for downstream experiments.

SpheroTribe is particularly useful to boost aggregation when working with challenging cells, minimize variability between samples and improve the consistency of your migration/invasion assays, immunostaining, drug screening or in vivo implantation experiments.

SpheroTribe improves cardiac organoid formation by boosting hiPSC aggregation

U-87 glioblastoma cells were seeded at 1,000 cells per well in round-bottom wells molded in agarose using a Stampwell U-shape (Idylle) in full culture medium without (right) or added with SpheroTribe (left). After 3 days, pictures were taken and number of cell aggregates per well were quantified from 64 independent wells and associated standard deviation (SD) values were calculated.


Kit Description:

You can purchase just the methylcellulose solution or choose among 2 different size kits:

25mL kit contents:

  • 25mL of 5X methylcellulose solution
  • 10x U-bottom 96-well plates
  • 2x racks of 96 pipette tips (200µL) with a large opening
2.5mL kit contents:

    • 2.5mL of 5X methylcellulose solution
    • 1x U-bottom 96-well plate
    • 20 pipette tips (200µL) with a large opening

Applications

SpheroTribe has been successfully used for spheroid/organoid formation with the following cell types:
Patient-derived stem-like glioblastoma cells (GB P3 and BL13), human glioblastoma cell lines (U87 & T98G), HeLa, human vaginal mucosal melanoma (HMV-II), human primary colorectal cancer cells, human breast cancer cells (MDA-MB 231), human induced pluripotent stem cells, monkey kidney fibroblast-like cell line (COS-7), primary neurons from rat embryos (E18) & murine melanoma cells (B16F10).

Experimental assays:
Once spheroids have grown to your desired size, you can use them for any kind of assay according to your regular workflow. The SpheroTribe solution can be readily washed off, leaving a spheroid available for other tests at any stage of your protocol.

Immune infiltration of B16F10 spheroids after immune checkpoint blockade

A. 10,000 B16F10 cells were grown for 6 days as spheroids using SpheroTribe. B. 100,000 PBMC from murine spleen were activated with IL-15 (40 ng/mL) [1], incubated with anti-PD1 (10 µg/mL) for 1h and added on B16F10 spheroids for 3 days.
Graph shows flow cytometry quantification of differential lymphocyte infiltration after spheroid dissociation according to treatment. N=4. Mann-Whitney U Test, p-value<0.05. [1] https://doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2022.898732.


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