• Question: Can you feed the stem cells, like you can feed embryos?

    Asked by cookiejayden to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 19 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan

      Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      Hi cookiejayden,
      I think the answer is yes here. Obviously they don’t have mouths/digestive systems since they are just a dish of single cells but we do need to supply them with nutrients. These are present in the media we grow them in. If we didn’t feed them in this way they wouldn’t self-renew (keep producing more).

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      As Aoife says it’s in the media (liquid) we grow them in. This contains everything the cells need to live and grow, like sugars, fats, proteins, just like a developing embryo. The difference is that these cells get their nutrients by diffusion through the cell membrane because they are a single layer of cells spread out over a plastic surface. In an embryo the cells grow into a 3D structure and there is a limit to how far nutrients can diffuse, so the embryo needs to make a blood system to move nutrients around as it develops. I hope that answers your question.

    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      I’ll just a little more to the answers Aoife and Matt gave. They’re both right that we do feed stem cells using the liquid they are grown in and this does basically work in the same way to the way embryos grown in the lab are fed. I’ll just add a bit that relates to my own research:

      A lot of the nutrients that the cells need are taken into the cell through special channels in the cell membrane. These channels have a specific shape that means they can only let through particular nutrients. In my work, I have studied the way embryonic stem cells eat sugar and the channels that allow glucose sugar into the embryonic stem cells. These channels will only allow glucose to pass through the membrane and other channels are needed to let other nutrients into the cell. Because cells can control how many channels they have in the membrane, cells can use this to control what nutrients they use. It would make sense that cells with more of a glucose channel in the membrane will take more glucose into the cell and will use more glucose. I’m trying to learn more about how this is controlled.

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