Hi everyone.
There is a category of cell lines called as Cell lines in Non-Cancerous in the database. But they are termed as transformed cell lines. A few examples are OELE and HMEL. My question is that can these be used as a substitue for normal cell lines since we do not have information on nomal/control cell lines here?
I’m likely not the best person to answer this question, however, what I can say is when the topic of which lines we can use as a proxy for normals comes up, the question becomes “used for what?” No cell lines will ever be truly be “normal” because there will be alterations in order to get a line that can be passaged indefinitely, and they are grown in artificial environments. For some questions, these lines might be a good enough proxy, but for some questions, they will not.
However I can say, if one wants to make a comparison to normal tissue to evaluate general toxicity, we generally don’t look at individual lines, but instead often use the full panel of lines to assess whether a treatment is likely toxic to normal tissue.
For other questions, it might be useful to use one of these non-cancerous lines, but any comparisons will always have a fair number of caveats. I don’t think we fully understand in which ways they are identical to normal tissue and which ways they are different.
Thanks,
Phil
Ok. Thank you for the explanation.
