Metabolite Detection of Cell Samples

Metabolites are one of the important components and expressions of life activities. The change of metabolite index is not only closely related to gene and protein expression, but also affected by external factors in the environment of the organism. Metabolite detection plays an important role in many areas of life science research.

Cell is the basic unit of organism structure and function, and is also the first place of biological metabolism, which is of great significance for metabolic research, and cell sample is also an important sample type for metabolic determination.

The cell is the most basic unit of complete metabolic function

The detection of cell samples is widely used in many studies of medicine, physiology and cell biology, and cultured cells have become the preferred sample type for more and more researchers.

1 Advantages of cell samples

Shorter experimental cycle: Compared with experimental animal breeding, the experimental cycle of cultured cells is much shorter, usually only a few hours to a few days, which greatly shortens the experimental cycle and improves the efficiency of scientific research.

Lower cost of experiments: Compared to in vivo experiments, the experimental cost of cell culture is lower. For example, some statistical conclusions that require 100 rats to be grouped into experiments may be achieved with only a few porous culture plates if cultured cells are used.

Easier to control the environment: the environmental conditions of cells in organisms are complex and changeable, such as temperature, pH, CO2 concentration, pressure, etc., are affected by a variety of factors. However, in cell culture conditions, these factors are easily controlled and maintained at a certain level, which is convenient for targeted isolated analysis of research objects.

Higher uniformity: Biological tissue is composed of a large number of cells, which are impossible to achieve uniformity in either type or state. However, after a certain number of cell culture in vitro, cell lines with single cell type, synchronous cell cycle and consistent cell character can be obtained, providing a large number of samples with high uniformity.

Wider variety: In vivo experiments are limited by feeding conditions, bioethics and other conditions, and the selection of suitable species as samples is limited. The types of cultured cells can range from lower biological cells to higher biological cells and even human cells, from stem cells to adult cells, from normal tissue cells to tumor tissue cells, providing more species research materials for life science research.

2 Characteristics of cell sample detection

Compared with tissue samples, the cell density in cultured cell samples is much lower, and the content of relevant detection indicators is also lower, so the detection limits of detection methods are higher. The detection limits of many metabolite detection kits widely used in tissue samples cannot meet the detection limits of cell samples of the order of 106. Therefore, more sensitive detection methods (such as fluorescence) are needed to adapt to the needs of cell samples. Elabscience® summarizes the testing needs of cell samples, and has developed and launched multiple test kits for cell samples that can be applied to various research areas such as oxidative stress, iron death, copper death, mitochondrial function, glycolipid metabolism, etc.

Click to View Elabscience® Cell Metabolism Assay Kit Products

In addition, the requirements for cell fragmentation operations for cultured cell samples are different from those for tissue samples. The traditional mechanical or manual homogenization method of cell fragmentation is low and unstable, while the use of ultrasonic fragmentation has a high demand for sample size and instruments, so the use of cell lysate for cell fragmentation is the most convenient and economical way of sample processing. In response to the problem that traditional cell lysates, such as RIPA lysates, can interfere with most metabolic measurements, Elabscience® has developed a series of cell lysates for metabolic indicators to simplify the process and improve the efficiency of the experiment.

Click to view Elabscience® Metabolic Assay Cell Lysate

It should be pointed out that no matter how the in vivo environmental conditions are simulated, there are some differences between cells cultured in vitro and cells grown in vivo, especially the lack of neurohumoral regulation. Therefore, the experimental results of cultured cells cannot be completely equivalent to in vivo experiments at present, and many aspects of the research results need to be judged.