Synchronous culture

A synchronous or synchronized culture is a microbiological culture or a cell culture that contains cells that are all in the same growth stage.

Since numerous factors influence the cell cycle, some of them stochastic (random), normal, non-synchronous cultures have cells in all stages of the cell cycle. Obtaining a culture with a unified cell-cycle stage is very useful for biological research. Since cells are too small for certain research techniques, a synchronous culture can be treated as a single cell; the number of cells in the culture can be easily estimated, and quantitative experimental results can simply be divided in the number of cells to obtain values that apply to a single cell. Synchronous cultures have been extensively used to address questions regarding cell cycle and growth, and the effects of various factors on these.