Differential Incorporation of Glucose into Biomass during Warburg Metabolism

ABSTRACT: It is well established that most cancer cells take up an increased amount of glucose relative to that taken up by normal differentiated cells. The majority of this glucose carbon is secreted from the cell as lactate. The fate of the remaining glucose carbon, however, has not been well-characterized. Here we apply a novel combina-tion of metabolomic technologies to track uniformly labeled glucose in HeLa cancer cells. We provide a list of specific intracellular metabolites that become enriched after being labeled for 48 h and quantitate the fraction of consumed glucose that ends up in proteins, peptides, sugars/glycerol, and lipids. Most cancer cells are metabolically reprogrammed to takeup and utilize an increased amount of glucose relative to normal differentiated cells.1 The majority of the glucose taken up is secreted from cancer cells in the form of lactate, even i