What happens when culture media gets warm or cold during transport?

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"Culture media for IVF can go out of specification during transport for different reasons. This may be detrimental to the product, but not always. In this blog post I will explain what happens to the media when it gets too warm or too cold.

This is normal 

Culture media is designed to withstand being warm for several days, otherwise it could not be used in IVF. The media is kept at room temperature when produced so that all ingredients will dissolve easily and is not placed in cold storage until filled into bottles.

The main concern is that the media may be subjected to too high or low temperatures in the time between production and use. Although packed and transported to remain at the correct temperature under normal circumstances, sometimes things can go wrong. The cold chain might be broken due to e.g. malfunctioning refrigerators, extreme heat or freezing temperatures, making it difficult to know if the media are still OK to use when arriving at the clinic.

What happens when the temperature is out of specification?

There are two main things that may happen: the media can freeze or become too warm. Both may be detrimental to the product, but that is not always the case.

Frozen media

It takes some time for the media to freeze even if the temperature is below zero. The transport box and the thermal mass of the shipment work both ways and slow down freezing as well as warming. In practical experiments we have seen that even if the transport box is kept at -6 °C for up to three and a half hours, the media will still not freeze..."

Learn more: 

http://blog.vitrolife.com/togetheralltheway/what-happens-when-culture-media-gets-warm-or-cold-during-transport?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=30775759&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9VdijJjBYRgn5P8NX9mxMKTsTUlhXki58_k85uW8Cr7uvuVANfSp7cdMUmspFt-XhoywQfPR0HGwmBUfWvnvO4mebO6nqGB1dJeYZMAnwO_raUO8M&_hsmi=30775759