What is it about?
Charcoal-stripped serum (CSS) is an important and necessary component of the growth medium used to maintain cells in experiments studying the function of steroid hormones and endocrine therapies. We found that variability between commercial batches of CSS could affect the outcomes of individual experiments, and could effectively reverse how repeat experiments could be interpreted. Also, this CSS variability altered the mechanisms that cancer cells used to resist endocrine therapies. We explored ways to characterize and manage CSS variability to allow for more reproducibility across laboratories.
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Why is it important?
The ability to reproduce important findings across laboratories is paramount for advancing shared understanding of biological mechanisms. Our study demonstrates that charcoal-stripped serum (CSS), though necessary for studies in endocrine response and resistance, may contribute to difficulties in interpreting and reproducing data across laboratories. However, we show that these variable CSS effects can be characterized and reported to provide appropriate context for understanding published studies.
Perspectives
The impetus for this study was in large part based on conversations with a colleague who had mixed results in reproducing some of our previous results. From month to month, she could either perfectly replicate our findings or see nothing at all. It turned out that she only ordered CSS in small batches, and thus from month-to-month used different CSS. At the same time, we were ordering our new batch of CSS for the laboratory, and I had similar observations when using individual test samples from our suppliers. Based on this, it was clear that it would be important to understand whether the batch variability was responsible for the mixed reproducibility of our findings. Importantly, our original findings were not an artifact of the serum, but definable characteristics of the CSS could sometimes mask these findings.
Dr. Matthew J Sikora
University of Colorado Denver
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Endocrine Response Phenotypes Are Altered by Charcoal-Stripped Serum Variability, Endocrinology, October 2016, Endocrine Society,
DOI: 10.1210/en.2016-1297.
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