Noninvasive Liquid Diet Delivery of Stable Isotopes into Mouse Models for Deep Metabolic Network Tracing

Sun, R.C.; Fan, T.W.; Deng, P.; et al. 

To help overcome the challenges associated with in vivo tracer studies of model animals, Fan and colleagues developed a liquid diet procedure to deliver ¹³C₆-glucose into NSG mice. The administration is effective and noninvasive, enabling extensive metabolic tracing of a myriad of biochemical pathways, as quantified in tissue-based MS and NMR analysis. This developed approach was ultimately applied to patient-derived lung tumor xenografts as a function of mouse generations to track tumor-specific metabolic networks in NSG mice and compared to other tissue culture models to probe the effects of cancer cell metabolism on the tumor microenvironment.