The highly unnatural fatty acid profile of cells in culture

Lipidomic atlas of mammalian cell membranes reveals hierarchical variation induced by culture conditions, subcellular membranes, and cell lineages

“…The unnatural fatty acid profiles of lipids from cultured cells have been recently highlighted, 15 and our observations are fully consistent with those reports. All primary membrane preparations were rich in polyunsaturated lipids, while all cultured cells seemed to replace these lipids with mono-or di-unsaturated versions.…”

The diversity and breadth of cancer cell fatty acid metabolism

“…While the current focus of these physiological media rightly focused on amino acid and glucose levels [324], there remains a significant challenge to have these media reflect the physiological lipid environment. This issue already exists with existing cell culture approaches, which was comprehensively reported recently by Prof Else, where he concluded that "Fetal bovine serum… at 10% of media provides 2-3% of the fatty acid and cholesterol, 1% of the PUFA and 0.3% of the essential fatty acid linoleic acid (18: 2n-6) available to cells in the body" [325]. As we have highlighted in this review, lipid metabolism is critical for cancer cell biology and so significant consideration must be made when attempting to design "physiological media" that truly reflects the levels of all nutrients, especially the diversity of extracellular lipid sources (e.g.…”

Flavonoid and Non-Flavonoid Compounds of Autumn Royal and Egnatia Grape Skin Extracts Affect Membrane PUFA’s Profile and Cell Morphology in Human Colon Cancer Cell Lines

“…In this study, we demonstrated that Autumn Royal and Egnatia GSEs were also able to influence the membrane levels of total PUFAs. Different basal levels of PUFAs were found in untreated Caco2 and SW80 cells, probably due to cell type, developmental and growth stage of cells [ 37 ]. In SW480 cells with a lower degree of differentiation, the high AA levels found contribute to increasing the total PUFAs levels present in these cells, preparing the cellular pathways towards more inflammatory outcomes.…”

“…Both GSEs induced the levels of EFAs, LA and ALA, in all two cell lines studied. EFAs are important structural components of cell membranes that the animal cells must exclusively obtain from their environment [ 37 ]. Therefore, the increase of LA and ALA detected in treated Caco2 and SW80 cells was certainly attributable to the fatty acids contained in the grape skins.…”