Abstract
Objective Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are the leading cell factories for producing recombinant proteins in the biopharmaceutical industry. In comparison to other mammalian cell types, in vitro handling of CHO cells is relatively easy. For example, CHO cells can grow in suspension and reach high cellular densities in bioreactors. Therefore, studying the metabolism of CHO cells to improve the bio-production of these cells is an important subject of research. In this regard, constraint-based metabolic models are useful platforms to perform computational analysis of cell metabolism.
Results Here, we expanded the existing model of Chinese hamster metabolism (iCHO1766) with the help of four gap-filling approaches, leading to the addition of 773 new reactions and 335 new genes. We incorporated these into an updated genome-scale metabolic network model of CHO cells, named iCHO2101. This updated model substantially increased the number of reactions capable of carrying flux.
Conclusions The addition of these new data provides an important step towards more complete metabolic models of CHO cells.