Meeting Abstract

P2.90  Wednesday, Jan. 5  Fueled By Fat: Weddell Seal cell width as an indicator of growth CUEVAS, L.M.*; KANATOUS, S.B.; Colorado State University; Colorado State University lcuevas@rams.colostate.edu

Weddell Seals are elite diving mammals that use skeletal muscle under hypoxia to enable the use of myoglobin as a primary oxygen source. One way to study the extreme tissue of diving mammals is to culture skeletal muscle cells originally taken from a biopsy. Our lab is the first lab to be able to culture primary seal skeletal muscle cells. Seal muscle primarily uses lipids for energy synthesis, and the trend we were seeing was that increasing lipid increased cell growth. We initiated an experiment to determine optimal lipid concentration. The purpose was to determine optimal media conditions for culturing Weddell Seal skeletal muscle. One measurement used was to measure the width of the myotubes. In this experiment the measure of width did not show a significant difference between the media types. This lack of difference suggests that seal skeletal muscle cells may reach a certain size in width, and grow in length instead. This experiment led to investigation of whether this trend occurred in other mammalian cells, such as mouse cells. After growing C2C12 cells and measuring the width of the myotubes, there was indication that mouse cells width can change with different growth media. The data indicates that the mouse cells grew to approximately double the width of the seal cells. This implies that we may have not reached optimal media conditions in the seal cells. Further studies are needed to investigate other amounts of factors within the media. It is possible we may have achieved optimal lipid concentration within the media, but another factor such as glucose may need to be altered.