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Moles of a Substance per Cell Is a Highly Informative Dosing Metric in Cell Culture
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Moles of a Substance per Cell Is a Highly Informative Dosing Metric in Cell Culture

Claire M Doskey, Thomas J van 't Erve, Brett A Wagner and Garry R Buettner
PloS one, Vol.10(7), pp.e0132572-e0132572
2015
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0132572
PMCID: PMC4501792
PMID: 26172833
url
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0132572View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The biological consequences upon exposure of cells in culture to a dose of xenobiotic are not only dependent on biological variables, but also the physical aspects of experiments e.g. cell number and media volume. Dependence on physical aspects is often overlooked due to the unrecognized ambiguity in the dominant metric used to express exposure, i.e. initial concentration of xenobiotic delivered to the culture medium over the cells. We hypothesize that for many xenobiotics, specifying dose as moles per cell will reduce this ambiguity. Dose as moles per cell can also provide additional information not easily obtainable with traditional dosing metrics. Here, 1,4-benzoquinone and oligomycin A are used as model compounds to investigate moles per cell as an informative dosing metric. Mechanistic insight into reactions with intracellular molecules, differences between sequential and bolus addition of xenobiotic and the influence of cell volume and protein content on toxicity are also investigated. When the dose of 1,4-benzoquinone or oligomycin A was specified as moles per cell, toxicity was independent of the physical conditions used (number of cells, volume of medium). When using moles per cell as a dose-metric, direct quantitative comparisons can be made between biochemical or biological endpoints and the dose of xenobiotic applied. For example, the toxicity of 1,4-benzoquinone correlated inversely with intracellular volume for all five cell lines exposed (C6, MDA-MB231, A549, MIA PaCa-2, and HepG2). Moles per cell is a useful and informative dosing metric in cell culture. This dosing metric is a scalable parameter that: can reduce ambiguity between experiments having different physical conditions; provides additional mechanistic information; allows direct comparison between different cells; affords a more uniform platform for experimental design; addresses the important issue of repeatability of experimental results, and could increase the translatability of information gained from in vitro experiments.
Cell Line Drug Evaluation, Preclinical - methods Oligomycins - administration & dosage Reproducibility of Results Xenobiotics - administration & dosage Benzoquinones - administration & dosage Glutathione - metabolism Cell Count Humans Cell Size Xenobiotics - toxicity Oligomycins - toxicity Hep G2 Cells Dose-Response Relationship, Drug Osmolar Concentration Proteins - metabolism Models, Biological Drug Evaluation, Preclinical - statistics & numerical data Benzoquinones - toxicity ISRP Project 1 2015-2020

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