No abstract

MPV17 is described as a mitochondrial inner membrane channel. Although its function remains elusive, mutations in the MPV17 gene result in hepato-cerebral mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome in humans. In this study, we show that MPV17 silencing does not induce depletion in mitochondrial DNA content in cancer cells. We also show that MPV17 does not control cancer cell proliferation despite the fact that we initially observed a reduced proliferation rate in five MPV17-silenced cancer cell lines with two different shRNAs. However, shRNA-mediated MPV17 knockdown performed in this work provided misguiding results regarding the resulting proliferation phenotype and only a rescue experiment was able to shed definitive light on the implication of MPV17 in cancer cell proliferation. Our results therefore emphasize the caution that is required when scientific conclusions are drawn from a work based on lentiviral vector-based gene silencing and clearly demonstrate the need to systematically perform a rescue experiment in order to ascertain the specific nature of the experimental results.

Mature B cell malignancies constitute a wide range of biologically and clinically heterogeneous hematological diseases. Despite an increasingly thorough understanding of the pathophysiology of these pathologies and significant improvements in therapies, a dismal outcome still affects a large number of patients. Therefore, further investigations into new treatment perspectives are highly needed and they depend entirely on the ex vivo culture of patient cells. Primary cells usually demand superior culture models, as they are notoriously difficult to cultivate. The literature is not devoid of approaches ranging from two- to three-dimensional systems for culturing mature malignant primary B cells. However, they display substantial protocol inter-variation. This imposes a high risk of failures, repeats, and inconsistent results, which are neither compatible with the rare value of primary cells nor the efficiency of the drug discovery process. In this review, we provide a thorough overview of the different approaches that have been implemented in the literature for the culture of mature malignant primary B cells, and we discuss associated considerations and limitations to assist researchers in determining a fit-for-purpose culture system, thereby attempting to reduce the number of trials and errors as well as associated biomaterial expenditure.