MediaAssist: database to support the design and optimization of cell culture medium

Animal cell culture is widely used for research in fundamental biology, drug discovery, and the manufacture of biopharmaceutical products such as recombinant proteins, vaccines, and cell therapies. The nutritional medium used to culture animal cells is a complex mixture of >50 components. Historically, it has been supplemented with sera such as fetal bovine serum, but commercial applications now widely use serum-free media. Developing or optimizing a medium formulation requires knowledge of chemical parameters such as solubility and stability and benefits from knowledge of biological parameters such as specific nutrient uptake rates and transporters of the different components. The complexity of medium design and optimization is increased manifold by the possibility of co-dependencies between components, where the effect of one component depends on the concentration of another. To our knowledge, there is no common repository of these chemical and biological parameters, including co-dependencies. The MediaAssist database collates this information to aid in designing and optimizing cell culture medium. Much of this information, such as co-dependencies, is dynamic, and we intend to keep updating the database as new information becomes available. MediaAssist is available at https://mediaassist.ncl.res.in.