A Simple Cell Culture Intervention for Healthier Cells

When scientists grow cells in culture, they fine tune factors such as medium ingredients, cell number, and incubator temperature to mimic the human body. However, one culture condition that researchers often overlook is oxygen consumption.

“Cells are grown in aqueous medium and there's a cell monolayer, which generates an oxygen sink where cells are consuming oxygen at the bottom of the petri dish,” explained Joycelyn Tan, cellular biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “Even though you have a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere, once the oxygen enters a liquid, it diffuses much more slowly. And considering that oxygen is usually consumed by the cells at one end of the liquid, this further reduces the amount of oxygen available in the cellular microenvironment," Tan added in an email.

While completing her graduate studies at University of Cambridge's Institute of Metabolic Science, Tan explored the relationship between cell culture oxygen concentration and cellular metabolism. In recent work published in EMBO Journal, Tan and her colleagues investigated how cultured adipocytes consume oxygen and the effects of modulating oxygen consumption rates (OCR).¹ The researchers used the Resipher Device by Lucid to measure live OCR in cell culture and found that standard cell culture conditions can be functionally hypoxic. 

“The oxygen environment of the incubator is not an accurate representation of the oxygen concentrations that your cells are actually experiencing,” Tan said. “It can affect many aspects of cell metabolism and cell function, and that ultimately impinges on the reliability of the experimental findings that we get from in vitro experiments.” By lowering the media volume, and thus increasing the pericellular oxygen, Tan observed lowered hypoxia signaling and transcriptional rewiring that recapitulated a healthier adipocyte cell model.

“This observation that manipulating oxygen can improve cell function is especially important because it's a simple intervention that everyone can do to make their cell model a little bit closer to cells that are in a human body,” Tan said. “I think measuring OCR is taking us one step closer to more accurate and detailed reporting.”

Learn more about detecting oxygen consumption rates in cell culture.

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