Team:Northwestern/Protocol/Preparation of Competent Cells

From 2010.igem.org

Materials

• Plate of cells to be made competent
• TSS buffer
• LB media
• Ice
• Glassware & Equipment

• Falcon tubes
• 500μl Eppendorf tubes, on ice
• 200ml conical flask
• 200μl pipetman or repeating pipettor
• 5ml pipette

Preparation

1. Grow a 5ml overnight culture of cells in LB media. In the morning, dilute this culture back into 25-50ml of fresh LB media in a 200ml conical flask. You should aim to dilute the overnight culture by at least 1/100.
2. Grow the diluted culture to an OD600 of 0.2 - 0.5. (You will get a very small pellet if you grow 25ml to OD600 0.2)
3. Put eppendorf tubes on ice now so that they are cold when cells are aliquoted into them later. If your culture is X ml, you will need X tubes. At this point you should also make sure that your TSS is being chilled (it should be stored at 4oC but if you have just made it fresh then put it in an ice bath).
4. Split the culture into two 50ml falcon tubes and incubate on ice for 10 min.

• All subsequent steps should be carried out at 4oC and the cells should be kept on ice wherever possible.

1. Centrifuge for 10 minutes at 3000 rpm and 4oC.
2. Remove supernatant. The cell pellets should be sufficiently solid that you can just pour off the supernatant if you are careful. Pipette out any remaining media.
3. Resuspend in chilled TSS buffer. The volume of TSS to use is 10% of the culture volume that you spun down. You may need to vortex gently to fully resuspend the culture, keep an eye out for small cell aggregates even after the pellet is completely off the wall.
4. Add 100 μl aliquots to your chilled eppendorfs and store at − 80oC.
5. It is a good idea to run a positive control on the cells.