Metabolic basis for differential glutamine requirements of human leukemia cell lines

We compared the ability of human leukemia cell lines of various origins to grow in glutamine-deficient media. The growth of B lymphoblastoid cell lines, including promyelocytic HL-60, is highly dependent on glutamine, whereas T-cell lines are able to proliferate in glutamine-free media. Such glutamine dependency has a good inverse correlation with the activity of glutamine synthetase. Moreover, glutamine synthetase can be induced in glutamine-deficient media, especially in glutamine-independent cells. In HL-60 cells, glutamine deprivation results in the decrease of both ATP and dATP levels. The addition of adenine to the culture medium abolishes these changes without restoring cell growth, indicating that the effects of glutamine deprivation on cell growth cannot be fully explained by the perturbation of adenine nucleotide pools.