Effects of hypothermia on the survival and cryopreservation of minipig ileal cells and Chinese hamster ovary cells.

Temperature of culture can be used to modulate cellular metabolism for improving small intestinal cell culture and cryopreservation. An hypothermia pretreatment (2 days at 25 degrees C and 3 hours recovery at 37 degrees C) improved hamster cell survival to freeze-thaw damage (p < 0.01) but decreased the survival of 2 immortal pig ileal cell lines even though epithelioid IPI-2I cells were more tolerant to hypothermia than IPI-1 fibroblasts. Epithelioid cells survived 3 days at 25 degrees C with unaltered expression of cytokeratin-18 whereas colonies of fibroblasts did not survive more than a day at 25 degrees C (p < 0.001). These results suggest that hypothermia-tolerance of pig ileal cell lines might differ according to cell lineage calling for further experiments on small intestinal primary cell culture.