the importance of lipids

If you scroll through the formulations for most foundational basal media (DMEM, RPMI, MEM, etc), here’s what you won’t find: Lipids.

These basal media were created over 50 years ago, before lipid metabolism and membrane biology were well understood. As such, you won’t find key fatty acids, cholesterol, and the delivery systems required to supply them to cells for efficient uptake.

This is just one of the many, many reasons that scientists include fetal bovine serum in their cell culture media; it delivers lipid complexity.

However, you'll notice a surprising number of serum-free media recipes don’t include many - sometimes any - lipids. This may appear okay for short-term cell growth, or even growth of particularly robust cell lines. But it does have an underappreciated impact. Without lipids, cells often end up with altered membrane composition, shifted eicosanoid pathways, ER stress, and/or rewired inflammatory signaling. Phenotypes like morphology, proliferation rate, and oxidative stress sensitivity often reflect this underlying lipid deficit.

This is something we thought a lot about when developing our chemically defined FBS replacement. And it’s something for you to think about if you’re trying to eliminate serum from your cell culture; are you incorporating the right lipids for your cells, and do you have the right strategy to ensure their bioavailability?

As always, journal articles below if you want to dive deeper 😊
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5661806/