Metabolic Flux Analysis of VERO Cells under Various Culture Conditions

Although the culture of VERO cells in bioreactors is an important industrial bioprocess for the production of viruses and vaccines, surprisingly few reports on the analysis of the flux distribution in the cell metabolism have been published. In this study, an attempt is made to fill this gap by providing an analysis of relatively simple metabolic networks, which are constructed to describe the cell behavior in different culture conditions, e.g., the exponential growth phase (availability of glucose and glutamine), cell growth without glutamine, and cell growth without glucose and glutamine. The metabolic networks are kept as simple as possible in order to avoid underdeterminacy linked to the lack of extracellular measurements, and a unique flux distribution is computed in each case based on a mild assumption that the macromolecular composition of the cell is known. The result of this computation provides some insight into the metabolic changes triggered by the culture conditions, which could support the design of feedback control strategies in fed batch or perfusion bioreactors where the lactate concentration is measured online and regulated by controlling the delivery rates of glucose and, possibly, of some essential amino acids.