First CHO genome
© Tous droits réservés par Ricardipus
An ancestor of the Chinese hamster ovary cell lines used for production of recombinant therapeutics has been sequenced.
Prof. Florian M Wurm & Dr. David Hacker (LBTC - Cellular Biotechnology Laboratory) comment on the recent publication of the first CHO genome (Xu et al.). Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells were originally chosen for commercial protein production because they were considered safe (as they do not propagate most human pathogenic viruses), allowed easy transfer of foreign DNA into their genome and grew rather quickly and robustly. They have since become the workhorse for industrial manufacture of recombinant therapeutic proteins and have even surpassed some microbial systems in productivity. In this issue of Nature Biotechnology, Xu et al. report the draft genome sequence of an ancestral cell line from which many CHO cell lines in industrial use today were derived. This work opens the door to a better understanding of these important immortalized cells, but the long history of study of the genetic instability of CHO cells suggests that many more lines will have to be sequenced before protein manufacturing can be improved through genomics.
Florian M Wurm & Dr. David Hacker, Nature Biotechnology 29, 718–720, doi:10.1038/nbt.1943 (2011)