Report of Mycoplasma contamination in Japan

Abstract

Mycoplasmas are smallest self proliferating microorganism of about 1/10 of a bacterium. While they are existing with cell cultures, it is difficult to realize because medium does not become turbid. But we should not ignore the mycoplasma contaminations because they induce many bad effects for our researches using cell cultures. For example they induce cell death, abnormal induction of cytokines, or chromosome aberrations. Thus, the Japan Tissue Culture Association recently started a nationwide investigation for the mycoplasma contaminations with cooperatively with the JCRB cell bank by using the inspection kit called “MycoAlert^®”. We have analyzed about 1500 samples already, and average rate of the contamination was 22.4%. We would like to identify contaminating mycoplasma species, and to specify the infection route in future. We also would like to introduce decontamination methods.