ClonaCell™ FLEX is a base methylcellulose medium that requires the addition of a 2X concentrate of the user’s own liquid medium to create a custom semi-solid cloning medium. This allows the user to adapt an existing liquid cloning method to a customized semi-solid cloning method. ClonaCell™ FLEX is recommended for selection and cloning of suspension-adapted mammalian cells, including CHO cells and hybridomas. The medium is chemically defined, animal component-free, and protein-free. It does not contain L-glutamine, selection agents, or phenol red. ClonaCell™ FLEX is compatible with a wide range of selection systems, including dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), glutamine synthetase (GS), and hypoxanthine, aminopterin, thymidine (HAT).

Benefits of semi-solid cloning:
• Individual clones and their progeny remain localized together in a semi-solid matrix as they grow to form distinct colonies. This prevents the loss of rare, high-producing clones by overgrowth from faster-growing cells, as can occur during selection in a liquid medium, and facilitates the isolation of a diverse set of clones with a wide range of growth rates and productivities to be obtained for downstream screening.
• Colonies obtained from semi-solid medium have a high probability of monoclonality, allowing clonal cell lines to be generated in less time and using fewer resources than with limiting dilution cloning.
• Colonies can be easily picked from the semi-solid medium by manual or robotic methods and dispersed into a liquid growth medium for screening and expansion.