DMEM citations: High or low glucose? - Is there a "generic" DMEM? (Feb/16/2010 )

Hello,

There are thousands of papers mentioning DMEM as the culture medium in their Methods, without saying whether it has LOW or HIGH glucose, Na-pyruvate, or L-glutamine. What DMEM are they referring to?

Hello Victorius,
Sigma provides a range of DMEM..w/o phenol red,glucose, glutamine etc...you have to choose a suitable one for your expts..all the components like i mentioned, can be added if required...normally glutamine, glucose and sodium pyruvate can be supplemented to the normal DMEM medium,containing various vitamins, minerals and aminoacids..
hope this helps

Thanks for your comment. My point was that when authors don't state exactly which kind of DMEM they used, replicating their experiments can be problematic. So I wondered whether there is a "default" DMEM, so to speak...

victorius on Feb 17 2010, 05:16 PM said:

This is the big problem with scientific papers, especially in the materials and methods section. Researchers do not go into this type of detail, so this is one example of why replication of results is so difficult. Reading a paper will never give you every "secret" that is required to replicate an experimental result.

Sorry I cannot be more helpful

Kindest regards

Rhombus

rhombus on Feb 17 2010, 03:12 PM said:

Totally agree with this, it is a big problem. I work in diabetes and metabolism and all of our cell lines are very sensitive to glucose concentrations. If it is critical to the survival of the cells, I find that most papers will note this. For example, pancreatic cell lines rarely survive or they grow painfully slow in low (5 mM) glucose and usually require very high glucose (25 mM). The biggest problem is when glucose concentrations alter the behaviour of the cell but do not necessarily affect its growth in an obvious way. I'll give you another example. If you grow a certain hepatic cell line in 25 mM glucose long term you will abolish their ability to produce glucose in response to pre-cursors, which is perhaps THE defining feature of the cell as it relates to diabetes. They will grow perfectly but they get lazy with all that glucose around. Now if you grow the same line in low, physiological 5 mM glucose, they will maintain this phenotype over many many passages. The same situation applies to most muscle cell lines and insulin mediated glucose uptake.

Bottom line - glucose is important and it should be noted in all papers. Will it happen? Hellllllllll no.

have you tried e-mailing the corresponding authors of the articles u r interested in? maybe they will be kind enough to give you DMEM's code number.

if the cell line is commercially available (i.e ATCC), then perhaps they would recommend a proper DMEM with the correct amount of glucose that they routinely culture with.

If that doesn't work, cell slave's suggestion is definitely your best bet.

labrat612 on Mar 4 2010, 01:43 PM said:

Not always the best approach. As I mentioned, some cells will grow fine, even better, in higher glucose. It doesnt mean that this is best for them. ATCC is not always accurate in this regard. You need to more about the biology of the cell before you go picking glucose concentrations etc.