I want to compare the toxicity of a plant based compound on proliferating and non-proliferating cells. For proliferating cells, there are a lot of cancerous cell lines that can be used. Can anyone suggest some cell lines which are non-proliferating excluding primary cells.
I think non cancerous cell line like CHO can be used its non cancerous ,
non-proliferating cells can't be kept as continuous cultures, obviously. you need to use a temperature-controlled conditionally transformed cell line, usually obtained by transfection with the mutant large-T protein from SV40 (which is stable at 33degrees but not at 39 degrees) such as the HiB5 cell line. Cells proliferate happily at 33 but stop and become quiescent at 39.
I would recommend that you use two different types of proliferating cells: one cancer cell line ( HeLa) and one non-transformed cell line (human fibroblasts). Cancer cell lines have abnormal signaling and may or may not be reflective of how your compound could work on normal cells.
Try growing the cells in serum free media plus and minus serum. The cells with serum will proliferate at their normal rate and the serum free cells will grow slowly or not at all. You may have to grow the cells in serum free media for a day or two before their proliferation rate slows. The add the compound.
Like Francesco I would recommend to use conditionally immortlized cell lines. They have advantage that you can test your compound in the same setting (meaning the same cell line) under proliferating and non proliferating conditions.
In addition to the temperature sensitive large T antigen a lot of different technologies have been described to develop such conditionally immortalized cell lines.
We compared the different approaches in a recent review. (here is the link to pubmed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23863696)
Thank you everyone for your ideas. They helped me a lot to clear some doubts.
I agree with the idea of immortalized cell line. If you want to go with some simple and inexpensive solution, I would compare sub-confluent and confluent conditions. I suggest to avoid the serum-free conditions, without serum cells stop growing, but the it means a complex stress affecting cellular metabolism. On the other hand, don't add fresh serum (e.g. by changing medium) when you treat your cells.
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