Reducing mitomycin-C-induced ROS levels in mouse feeder cells improves induced pluripotent stem cell colony growth.

Chemically defined stem cell culture media are often costly, and the use of mitotically arrested mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) as feeder cells is a popular and cost-efficient way to maintain induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). However, the commonly used mitotic inhibitor mitomycin-C (MMC) is known to cause cellular metabolic stress. Therefore, our aim was to determine whether such stress in feeder cells indirectly affects iPSC growth during coculture. We report that prolonged exposure to MMC causes metabolic stress in MEFs in the form of oxidative dysregulation. Through optimization of MMC exposure time, we show how to effectively arrest MEFs without inducing oxidative stress, thus promoting significantly better colony growth rates (p < 0.05), improved viability and longer periods between passages of iPSCs in coculture.