Lab test reveals liver cells burn oxygen differently—and size really matters
Researchers discovered that individual human liver cells consume oxygen at vastly different rates depending on their size, and that cells clustered together actually reduce their metabolic activity. The finding could transform how companies develop artificial tissue models for drug testing and organ-on-a-chip technologies—making them far more accurate at predicting how drugs behave in real human bodies.
Originaltitel: Size-related variability of oxygen consumption rates in individual human hepatic cells
<p>Accurate descriptions of the variability in single-cell oxygen consumption and its size-dependency are key to establishingmore robust tissue models. By combining microfabricated devices with multiparameter identification algorithms, wedemonstrate that single human hepatocytes exhibit an oxygen level-dependent consumption rate and that their maximaloxygen consumption rate is significantly lower than that of typical hepatic cell cultures. Moreover, we found that clusters oftwo or more cells competing for a limited oxygen supply reduced their maximal consumption rate, highlighting their abilityto adapt to local resource availability and the presence of nearby cells. We used our approach to characterize the covarianceof size and oxygen consumption rate within a cell population, showing that size matters, since oxygen metabolism covarieslognormally with cell size. Our study paves the way for linking the metabolic activity of single human hepatocytes to theirtissue- or organ-level metabolism and describing its size-related variability through scaling laws.</p>