I was going through a couple of articles related to virus induced IP3K/Akt pathways. In some of those, I found people have serum starved the cells before virus infection or IP3K inhibitor treatment.
I understand that serum starvation will bring the cells under nutritional stress and force the cells to switch to cell survival mode and activate the IP3K and Akt signaling. But I don't understand why the cells are starved when someone is interested in looking for whether a virus is responsible or not for the IP3K and Akt signaling.
I believe serum starvation will act as a positive control in this case as you need to quantify and compare the phenotype. you may use inducers of pi3k-akt axis like rapamycin and rapalogs also instead of serum starvation, serum starvation however is a really good control.
I agree with claudio respect to positive controls. Another reason to do this is to synchronize the cells in one phase of the cell cycle (G0/G1 phase arrested) to improve virus infectivity.
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