A biochemical comparison of the lung, colonic, brain, renal, and ovarian cancer cell lines using (1)H-NMR spectroscopy

Cancer cell lines are often used for cancer research. However, continuous genetic instability-induced heterogeneity of cell lines can hinder the reproducibility of cancer research. Molecular profiling approaches including transcriptomics, chromatin modification profiling, and proteomics are used to evaluate the phenotypic characteristics of cell lines. However, these do not reflect the metabolic function at the molecular level. Metabolic phenotyping is a powerful tool to profile the biochemical composition of cell lines. In the present study, (1)H-NMR spectroscopy-based metabolic phenotyping was used to detect metabolic differences among five cancer cell lines, namely, lung (A549), colonic (Caco2), brain (H4), renal (RCC), and ovarian (SKOV3) cancer cells. The concentrations of choline, creatine, lactate, alanine, fumarate and succinate varied remarkably among different cell types. The significantly higher intracellular concentrations of glutathione, myo-inositol, and phosphocholine were found in the SKOV3 cell line relative to other cell lines. The concentration of glutamate was higher in both SKOV3 and RCC cells compared with other cell lines. For cell culture media analysis, isopropanol was found to be the highest in RCC media, followed by A549 and SKOV3 media, while acetone was the highest in A549, followed by RCC and SKOV3. These results demonstrated that (1)H-NMR-based metabolic phenotyping approach allows us to characterize specific metabolic signatures of cancer cell lines and provides phenotypical information of cellular metabolism.