PCR detection of mycoplasma contamination in cell lines, run in our own San Diego laboratory. Results 48 hours from receipt — not the 3 to 10 days a mail-away CRO will quote you.
Transparent Pricing
Published per-sample rates — no quote wall. One price, one method, one turnaround.
Need the 28-day compendial culture method instead? See the compendial option → · Ask about a standing screening schedule →
Mycoplasma are the contamination you cannot see. They have no cell wall, they pass through 0.2 µm filters, and they do not cloud medium or crash the pH the way bacteria and fungi do — a heavily contaminated flask looks perfectly healthy down the microscope while growth rate, metabolism, gene expression, and transfection efficiency quietly drift. The only way to know is to test.
Our PCR assay detects the common Mycoplasma, Acholeplasma, and Ureaplasma contaminants of cell culture — the genera responsible for the overwhelming majority of cell-line infections in research and manufacturing labs.
Results are reported per cell line as detected or not detected, on a signed Certificate of Analysis you can file against the line in your cell bank records.
Detection is by PCR on cell culture supernatant. Nucleic acid is extracted from the supernatant and amplified using a mycoplasma-directed PCR assay covering the target genera. Assay controls are run alongside your samples so that a not-detected result reflects a clean culture rather than a reaction that simply failed.
PCR reports on DNA, which is what makes it fast: no four-week incubation waiting for organisms to grow. It does not distinguish viable from non-viable organisms — if you need viability, that is what the compendial culture method is for.
PCR is the practical routine screen: incoming lines from a collaborator or repository, master and working cell bank qualification, monthly or quarterly sweeps of everything in the incubator, and a check before you commit a line to a long or expensive experiment.
1–2 mL of supernatant per line is logged in against your submission form and assigned a chain-of-custody ID. The 48-hour clock starts here — at receipt, not at the moment you shipped.
Nucleic acid is extracted from the supernatant and amplified. Assay controls are carried through the same run, so a not-detected result is interpreted against a control set rather than read in isolation.
Each line is reported detected or not detected, with control results shown, on a signed Certificate of Analysis delivered as PDF within 48 hours of receipt.
Why in house matters: a mail-away lab's 3 to 10 day quote is mostly logistics — transit, intake queue, and waiting for enough samples to justify a batched run. We run the assay ourselves in San Diego, so a sample received Monday is reported Wednesday.
Two of these are not preferences. Culture without antibiotics and sample at high confluence, or the result is not valid — both failure modes produce a clean-looking false negative on a contaminated line.
The antibiotics routinely used in cell culture suppress mycoplasma without eliminating them. A line kept on antibiotics can carry a persistent low-level infection that sits below the detection threshold on the day you sample and rebounds the moment the antibiotics come out. Grow the line antibiotic-free for a minimum of two passages before taking the test sample so any resident organisms return to a detectable level.
Mycoplasma titer in the supernatant builds as the culture grows and the medium is conditioned. A flask sampled the day after a fresh split has been diluted — cells and organisms alike — and a low-titer fresh split can read clean while the line is genuinely contaminated. Take the sample at high confluence, from medium that has been on the cells for two to three days.
| Requirement | Specification |
|---|---|
| Matrix | Cell culture supernatant. Supernatant only — do not send cells or pelleted material. |
| Volume | 1–2 mL per cell line. |
| Culture condition | Grown without antibiotics for at least two passages before sampling. Required. |
| Sampling point | At high confluence, from medium conditioned two to three days. Required. |
| Containers | Sealed, leak-proof cryovials or screw-cap tubes, one per line, each labeled with the cell line name so results can be reported line by line. |
| Shipping & handling | Ship or deliver cold. Samples may be frozen if there will be a delay between collection and delivery. Include the completed submission form in the box. |
| Turnaround | 48 hours from receipt at our San Diego laboratory. |
If a line has been on antibiotics and you need an answer sooner than two passages away, tell us when you submit. We can still run the sample — but a not-detected result on a suppressed culture has to be read as a screen, not as a clean bill of health, and it should be confirmed once the line has had two antibiotic-free passages.
Turnaround is measured from the moment your sample is logged in at our San Diego facility — not from when the report is scheduled, and not from an internal batching window. Most mail-away contract labs quote 3 to 10 days for the same PCR test. The difference is almost entirely logistics: transit time, an intake queue, and waiting until enough samples accumulate to justify running a plate.
An incoming line you want to put into an experiment, a suspect flask you need a verdict on before you contaminate the rest of the incubator, or a bank you are about to expand. A week of waiting is a week of either lost time or accumulating risk.
If you are in the San Diego biotech cluster you can hand the sample over the same morning you draw it. No overnight courier, no weekend stranded in a depot, no cold-chain gamble on a Friday shipment.
A 48-hour answer is what makes monthly or quarterly screening of every line in the facility something a lab actually keeps doing, rather than a good intention that lapses after the first round.
Any lab that keeps cells in continuous culture, shares an incubator, or accepts lines from outside the building.
Lines travel between groups and institutions constantly, and a single contaminated flask in a shared incubator seeds the rest of the room. Screening incoming lines on arrival, and everything in the facility on a schedule, is the cheapest insurance available against months of unusable data.
Mycoplasma alter proliferation, metabolism, and gene expression, which means they alter your readouts. Testing before a screening campaign, a long time-course, or any experiment you cannot cheaply repeat protects the data you are about to spend real money generating.
Master and working cell banks should be tested at the point of banking and again when a vial is thawed back into use, with the result filed against the line. We report per line so the record maps cleanly onto your bank inventory.
Shared tissue culture rooms concentrate the risk: many users, many lines, common water baths and pipettors. A periodic sweep across every line in the facility, priced at the 5+ rate, is the standard way to find the index case before it spreads further.
Production cell lines need documented mycoplasma-free status. PCR covers routine in-process and development-stage screening; where a submission calls for the compendial culture method, that is available as a separate scope.
Journals and repositories increasingly expect authentication and contamination status for cell lines used in published work. A dated Certificate of Analysis per line is the documentation that request is asking for.
Two different tools answering two different questions. Most labs need the first; some regulatory pathways require the second.
Amplifies mycoplasma DNA directly from culture supernatant. Fast enough to sit inside a normal work week, which is what makes it usable for routine screening, incoming line checks, and cell bank qualification. It detects DNA whether or not the organisms are viable, so a positive tells you the organism was there without telling you it is still alive. This is the service priced on this page.
A 28-day assay that grows viable organisms in broth and on agar, and the method regulators generally expect for GMP biologics and cell therapy submissions. It detects only viable organisms, and it takes four weeks. Prodigy Labs offers the compendial culture method on request as a separate scope of work — contact us to discuss timeline and quoting for your program.
A common pattern is to run PCR continuously through development for speed and to bring in the compendial culture method only at the points where a submission demands it. If you are unsure which your program needs, tell us the regulatory context and we will tell you straight.
We are in Sorrento Valley, and local drop-off is welcome — walk the sample over and skip the courier entirely.
Prodigy Labs serves the San Diego biotech cluster: Torrey Pines, UTC, and Sorrento Valley. For most labs in those three areas we are a short drive, which means a supernatant drawn at high confluence in the morning can be logged in before lunch and reported two days later — with no transit time, no cold-chain risk, and no shipment stranded over a weekend.
Drop-offs are accepted during normal business hours. Let us know you are coming so the sample can be logged straight in on arrival, and bring the completed submission form with you.
Not local? Ship cold to the same address. The 48-hour clock starts when the sample is received, so a Monday or Tuesday shipment is the safest way to keep the whole thing inside one week.
Prodigy Labs
5414 Oberlin Drive, Suite 150
San Diego, CA 92121
United States
Phone: 1 (888) 589-4615
Email: sales@prodigyscientific.com
Serving Torrey Pines, UTC, Sorrento Valley, and the wider San Diego research community — and shipping-in clients nationwide.
Arrange a Drop-Off →The most common source is another contaminated cell line already in the lab — shared incubators, water baths, media bottles, and pipettors move mycoplasma between flasks. Contaminated biological reagents such as serum, and aerosols generated by pipetting or by personnel, are the other routine routes. Because mycoplasma have no cell wall, they do not cloud media or change pH the way bacterial or fungal contamination does, so a heavily contaminated flask can look completely normal under the microscope. Detection requires a dedicated test.
Antibiotics commonly used in cell culture suppress mycoplasma without eliminating them. A culture kept on antibiotics can carry a low-level, persistent infection that falls below the detection threshold on the day you sample, then rebounds once the antibiotics are removed. That is a false negative. Culture the line without antibiotics for at least two passages before you take the test sample so any resident organisms return to a detectable level.
Mycoplasma titer in the supernatant builds up as the culture grows and the medium is conditioned. A flask sampled the day after a fresh split has been diluted — both the cells and any organisms present — and can read clean even when the line is genuinely contaminated. Take the sample at high confluence, from medium that has been on the cells for two to three days, so the organism load in the supernatant is at its highest.
PCR detects mycoplasma DNA and returns a result in 48 hours, which makes it the practical choice for routine cell bank screening, incoming line qualification, and release of research material. The compendial culture method described in USP <63> and Ph. Eur. 2.6.7 is a 28-day assay that grows viable organisms in broth and agar and is the method regulators expect for GMP biologics and cell therapy submissions. PCR detects DNA whether or not the organisms are viable; culture detects only viable organisms but takes four weeks. Prodigy Labs runs PCR in house and offers the compendial culture method on request as a separate scope of work.
48 hours from receipt of the sample at our San Diego laboratory. Most mail-away contract labs quote 3 to 10 days for the same PCR test, largely because the sample spends days in transit and then waits for a batched run. We run mycoplasma PCR in house, so a sample dropped off or delivered on Monday is reported on Wednesday.
1 to 2 mL of cell culture supernatant per cell line, taken at high confluence from a culture that has been grown without antibiotics for at least two passages. Supernatant only — do not send the cells. Label each tube with the line name so results can be reported line by line.
A positive means mycoplasma DNA was detected in that supernatant, so any data generated on that line should be treated as suspect — mycoplasma alter growth rate, metabolism, gene expression, and transfection efficiency. Standard practice is to quarantine the flask, discard it rather than treat it if a clean frozen stock exists, restart from that stock, and then test the other lines and incubators in the same room, because the contamination has usually already spread. Re-test the restarted line after two antibiotic-free passages before returning it to general use.
$150 per sample. $125 per sample when five or more samples are submitted together in one submission. Pricing covers PCR detection of common Mycoplasma, Acholeplasma, and Ureaplasma contaminants of cell culture, with a per-line Certificate of Analysis.
Move the line off antibiotics for at least two passages, then let it reach high confluence. Draw 1–2 mL of supernatant per line into a labeled, leak-proof tube.
Deliver to 5414 Oberlin Drive, Suite 150, San Diego, CA 92121, or ship cold to the same address. Tell us via the form at /contact or on 1 (888) 589-4615 how many lines are coming so we can have the run ready.
A signed Certificate of Analysis per line is delivered as a secure PDF 48 hours from receipt. Detected results are called out clearly on the report so you can act on them the same day.
A note on accreditation scope. Prodigy Scientific, Inc. is accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 by PJLA under Accreditation #96417. Accreditation status varies by method — our accredited scope is published in the PJLA directory at pjlabs.com, and we’ll confirm coverage for any specific test on request. Read more about our accreditation →
Mycoplasma testing is often ordered alongside the following services.
$150 per sample, $125 at five or more, and 48 hours from receipt. Drop off in Sorrento Valley or ship cold — either way you have an answer before the end of the week.