• Question: Do things like temperature affect the way or speed stem cells grow?

    Asked by charlocked to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 14 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Yes they will. To be honest, I don’t know how much of a difference temperature makes, but I do know that we grow stem cells in our lab in an incubator that keeps the temperature at 37 degrees. This is to help them to grow quickly.

      A lot of work in our lab is looking at how the amount of oxygen the cells gets affects them and we see that cells grown with less oxygen grow faster than those grown with more oxygen. Also less oxygen keeps the stem cells happier generally.

      Also, I am looking at how stem cells use nutrients that we give them. All of this together shows that the stem cells are very sensitive to their environment, including temperature and oxygen.

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Yes temperature does affect cells, as Dave says we generally grow cells at 37C, which is body temperature. This is because enzymes in the cells work best at this temperature. However, if you lower the temperature of the cells you can slow down their growth, in fact cells will quite happily grow at around 30C for a while. There is also some evidence that some stem cells will become different cell types at temperatures above or below 37C, for example one type of stem cells will turn into pancreas cells when they are grown at around 35C without anything else causing them to change.

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