X-Message-Number: 24460
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 10:40:37 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: DMSO as a cryoprotectant

For Doug Skrecky:

Unfortunately DMSO has been thoroughly investigated for a long time
as a cryoprotectant and doesn't work as well as some others. I am
not engaged in studying cryoprotectants, I'm just reporting what
I've read. Greg Fahy, who counts as an authority on this subject,
is probably much too busy with vitrification to reply to your
message.

Until Fahy and others started to get better solutions, glycerol
turned out to be superior. Early suspensions were actually done
with DMSO. Now we have solutions better than glycerol. As I 
understand it, there is a wide choice of possible solutions;
Fahy and Wowk have come up with some simple tests which can
be applied to a solution to see if it's at least a candidate
for further work. As you can guess, such tests are quite valuable
just because many possible choices exist.

            Best wishes and long long life for all,

             Thomas Donaldson

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