Dynamics of metabolism of normal and virus-transformed chick cells in culture

Application of steady-state tracer technique to normal and transformed cells in tissue culture allows quantitation of intracellular pool sizes of many metabolites and determination of rate of carbon flow along diverse paths. Using a unique apparatus to control the environmental conditions, we show that the glucose carbon flow into tricarboxylic acid cycle intermediates and amino acids is unchanged upon transformation. The increased glycogen formation and glycolysis varies with the glucose concentration in the medium, correlates with the faster glucose transport of transformed cells, and cannot be explained by a difference in growth rate alone.