Online Glucose Measurement in DMEM for In Vitro Cell Culture

Abstract

In-vitro cell culture offers the ability to grow individual cells and monitor their behaviour in a controlled environment over a certain time. During culture, different parameters have to be controlled to ensure a vital growth of cells. The most important parameters are temperature, pH-value, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels as well as the glucose concentration. All of these parameters influence the growth ability of the cell culture and should be monitored online. The online monitoring of glucose was achieved with a novel GOD based sensor which enabled a real-time measurement of glucose during cell culture. A first-time characterisation of the sensor was carried out in the culture medium DMEM. In addition, material properties of the culture system were investigated. At first to establish a baseline measurement, the sensor was placed in different glucose concentrations dissolved in Water-KCl mixture at 25 °C inside a batch chamber under constant stirring. Afterwards, the temperature was increased to 37 °C to simulate a cell culture environment. In addition, the system was transferred into a flow-through reaction chamber. The highest response signal and the most stable signal was achieved at 37 °C with DMEM during flow-through measurement. Based on these measurements online glucose monitoring in cell culture was possible to determine the glucose consumption for each cell which is important for future human-on-a-chip devices to prevent diabetic metabolisms.