In vitro vs. in vivo vs. ex vivo vs. in situ vs. in silico

In where? In vitro, in vivo, ex vivo, in situ, & in silico - when it comes to what happens where, here's what there is to know!

In vivo: in a living organism

Latin: within the living

In vitro: not in a living organism - instead, in a test tube or in cells or something like that (though cells are a bit of an intermediate zone - and for single-celled organisms like yeast and bacteria, cell culture is in vivo!)

Biochemistry often takes a reductionistic approach where we’re studying things in vitro with the minimal components necessary

Sometimes people refer to work done in cell culture as “in cellulo” or “in culture.”

Latin: in glass

Ex vivo: experiments or work done on tissue from a living organism worked on outside of that living organism, but with minimal disruption & as natural of conditions as possible. This contrasts with in vitro cell culture work, where we usually break tissues up into individual cells and use highly artificial conditions in order to allow them to survive for a long time

Latin: out of the living

In silico: in computer-land: computational stuff (no pipetting thumbs were harmed in the making of these results!). For example, molecular docking can be used to predict whether molecules might bind to a protein of interest by seeing if their structures could theoretically fit together nicely.

In situ: in the original place (eg. Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization, FISH, where you bind fluorescent probes to molecules inside of cells to see where those molecules are hanging out). There’s also increasing technological advancements leading to in situ sequencing to localize mRNA transcripts inside of cells to see what’s being made where

Latin: on site

blog version: https://bit.ly/invitrovivoetc

for more on experimental systems: blog form: https://bit.lyt/experimentalsystems ; YouTube:    • Choosing an experimental system in bi...    

more terminology: http://bit.ly/bumblingbiochemistglossary &    • terminology  

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