The Role of Glutamine in Hybridoma Cell Culture

Abstract

Glutamine is an essential amino acid that provides a major energy source in mammalian cells. It plays the role of both carbon and nitrogen sources. The concentration of glutamine strongly influences the cell metabolism that governs cell growth and monoclonal antibody productivity. Furthermore glutamine stimulates certain post-transcriptional rate limiting step in antibody secretion (Bibila & Flickinger (1991)). The glutamine uptake rate is influenced by culture mode, serum concentration, specific growth rate, glucose concentration, and glutamine concentration. Many experiments have been carried out in order to understand the relationship between glutamine concentration and cell metabolism, especially the relationship between glutamine and the other amino acids (Kurokawa et al. (1993), Jeong & Wang (1995), Neermann & Wagner (1996), Vriezen et al. (1997)). Consequently, the decrease of glutamine concentration may reduce the glutamine uptake rate, however the relationship remains somewhat unclear. Recently, the technique for estimating intracellular metabolic fluxes from extracellular utilization and production rates has been developed. In this study a chemostat culture was carried out under a wide range of glutamine feed concentrations and intracellular metabolism was studied by using metabolic flux technique.