Labeling Cancer Stem Cells with ¹³C₆ Glucose and ¹³C₅ Glutamine for Metabolic Flux Analysis

Abstract

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) or tumor-initiating cells (TICs) are a population of cells present within tumor that have increased self-renewal, chemoresistance, and aggressiveness, thereby contributing to tumor relapse. Literature shows that CSCs or TICs typically originate within the hypoxic niches of the tumor, making hypoxia one of the driving factors for generation of this population. Hypoxic stress promotes adaptation to low oxygen tension in the tissues by altering metabolic properties of the CSCs. This leads to a number of altered enzymatic activities in the CSC population that further contribute to the survival of the CSCs leading to resistance to standard therapy. Hence, understanding this altered metabolic pathways as well as targeting key nodes in these may pave the way for cancer management.

Glucose and glutamine are the major substrates utilized by cancer cells and feed into multiple biosynthetic pathways. Hence, labeling and tracking these compounds may reveal some novel metabolic pathways exploited by cancer stem cells to acquire survival advantage. In these current book chapters, we elaborately summarized the basic steps required for isolation, characterization, and metabolic labeling (¹³C₆ glucose and ¹³C₅ glutamine) of CSC for flux analysis.