Effects of culture media on metabolic profiling of the human gastric cancer cell line SGC7901.

Cell culture metabolomics has demonstrated significant advantages in cancer research. However, its applications have been impeded by some influencing factors such as culture media, which could significantly affect cellular metabolic profiles and lead to inaccuracy and unreliability of comparative metabolomic analysis of cells. To evaluate the effects of different culture media on cellular metabolic profiling, we performed NMR-based metabolomic analysis of the human gastric cancer cell line SGC7901 cultured in both RPMI1640 and DMEM. We found that SGC7901 cultured in the two media exhibited distinct metabolic profiles with obviously different levels of discrepant metabolites, even though they showed almost the same cellular morphology and proliferation rates. When SGC7901 originally cultured in RPMI1640 was gradually acclimated in DMEM, both the metabolic profiles and most of the discrepant metabolite levels gradually converged toward those of the cells originally cultured in DMEM without significantly altered cell proliferation rates. However, several metabolite levels did not show the converging trends. Our results indicate that the effects of culture media on metabolic profiling must be carefully taken into account for comparative metabolomic analysis of cell lines. This work may be of benefit to the development of cell culture metabolomics.