Cryopreservation of cultured mantle cells of Paphia malabarica for perennial availability

Cnidarian Cell Cryopreservation: A Powerful Tool for Cultivation and Functional Assays

“…This is a major and significant progress for marine invertebrate cell cryopreservation. In fact, although few studies evaluated the cryopreservation efficiency after a storage of several weeks [22,24,25,28] and a maximum of 12 months [30], the majority only cryopreserved cells for a few hours to a few days [23,26,27,29,33,35,36].…”

“…This monitoring constitutes an essential part in validating the storage protocol for further use of cryopreserved cells and represents a major strength of this study. Indeed, the reseeding of thawed cells was rarely done on previous marine invertebrate studies, and cells are usually maintained only for a few hours to a few days [22][23][24][25]27,28], with a maximum of 15 days for bivalve cells in Dessai (2018) [30] and around 40 days for sponge cells [32,34]. Therefore, cryopreserved cells maintained through time identical viability, growth, and shape to the corresponding non-cryopreserved cell culture, and this independently of the cryopreservation duration.…”

“…Therefore, not only A. viridis cells in vitro can be successfully cryopreserved and reseeded, but they can be reliably used for further experiments, like it is done for mammalian cells. Although functional analyses are sometimes conducted for marine invertebrate cells, through metabolic and enzymatic activities [23][24][25][26]28,30], only some sponge cells studies conducted experiments using cryopreserved cells [31,34]. However, this is a fundamental assessment in order to validate the cryopreservation protocol for creating reliable models.…”

“…However, considering the limited advancements in marine invertebrate cell cultures, cryopreservation of marine invertebrate dissociated cells is seldom reported [18]. If they are, they largely focus on Mollusks [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], with some other studies conducted on Echinoderms (e.g., dissociated cells from sea urchins larvae [24,28]), on sponge cells [31][32][33][34] and on coral cells dissociated from embryos or larvae [35,36]. In addition, none of these studies, except those on sponge cells, maintained cryopreserved cells in cultures for more than a few days nor use cryopreserved cells for subsequent experiments.…”