The irrigating buffers and salt solutions are sterile physiological balanced solutions intended for use in the maintenance of mammalian cells where a chemically defined, balanced salt solution provides an environnement that will maintain the structural and physiological integrity of cells in vitro. They were used for the first steps for preparing parts of organs and during the dissociation process or for isolation of cell suspensions. Further applications are the intermediate steps for cultivation of cells like washing, centrifugation, suspending and counting and also many analytical methods or biochemical treatments. Principally these solutions should be used to keep the cells only for minutes or maximal some hours into suspension. These buffers and solutions are no cell culture media.

They are composed of a Phosphate buffer system, sodium chloride to adjust the osmolarity and perhaps sugar for a short time nutrition and stabilisation of morphology. For applications where Ca2+ and Mg2+ ions interfere whith enzyme activity e.g. Trypsin, use the modified buffers w/o Calcium w/o Magnesium.