How to Choose the Right Cold Storage for Your Cell Culture Workflow

Take cold storage out of a cell culture workflow, and you don’t have a workflow. Whether it’s the short-term needs during culture expansion and characterization or the longer-term phases of preservation and collection, you’re turning to your lab refrigerators and lab freezers every day. How cold they get, how cold they stay, and how fast they recover their temperatures mean everything to the viability of your work.

Still, lab cold storage can frequently be a concern for money-saving efforts: the units’ costs and their ongoing maintenance costs, too. You may be thinking about looking at value units for at least some of your needs.

So when evaluating cold storage equipment, what are the most important factors?

Want to learn more? Explore our on-demand webinar: Choosing the Right Cold Storage for Cell Culture Applications.

Recovery time

A key factor to consider in the cell culture workflow, especially during short-term storage, is maintaining temperatures at the necessary level as much as possible. But directly at odds with that is our need to frequently access cell culture media, samples, and other materials. Each time the door is opened, temperature fluctuations expose your work to risk.

Think about the number of times someone reaches for that door each day: five? 10 or 20? More? Where our parents probably nagged us not to “air-condition the neighborhood” by standing in front of the open fridge door, it’s just as likely we’re air-conditioning the lab with our valuable storage.

A true medical-grade cabinet is especially designed to recover quickly from frequent door openings. In Thermo Fisher Scientific’s testing, we’ve found that value models can take four minutes to recover, double the time of high-performance models.

Find valuable tools for selecting the right cold storage solution

Recovery time is just one of the factors you should consider. Let’s make this easy! Find our easy-to-use online cold storage selection tool found on our Cell Culture Community site; it walks you through the questions to ask yourself when you are outfitting your lab. 

For even more cold storage tips, you can view the on-demand cell culture webinar, Choosing the Right Cold Storage for Cell Culture Applications.