An examination of the data and concepts germane to the oxygenation of cultured animal cells.

With the increasing demand for high productivity cultures (including unit process monolayer cultures) oxygenation has now become a problem much sooner in the scaling-up process. There are no problems with measuring the dissolved oxygen concentration, but maintaining a desired concentration is one of the major challenges in Animal Cell Technology. It is of key importance, because the oxygen level has critical effects on cell metabolism (13, 5, 9, 22, 40, 36) which not only affect cell growth but also the products that can be expressed by the cell. As the oxygen level for these two functions is often different (e.g. the production of Ig from lymphocytes (27) more attention must be paid to defining the optimal oxygen levels and methods whereby such levels can be maintained in the least destructive manner.