MEM Non-Essential Amino Acids Solution 100X

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• MEM Alpha (α-MEM) and Minimum Essential MediumMEM alpha (α-MEM) is Eagle's Minimum Essential Medium enriched with all the non-essential amino acids, sodium pyruvate, lipoic acid, ascorbic acid, biotin and vitamin B12, and is supplied either with or without ribonucleosides and deoxyribonucleosides. It uses the same salt base as MEM — 2,200 mg/L sodium bicarbonate matched to a 5% CO2 atmosphere, 1,000 mg/L glucose and 1.8 mM calcium — and is the standard medium for mesenchymal stromal cells, bone marrow cultures, osteoblasts, CHO-DXB11 and CHO-DG44 selection, and many primary cell types. The nucleoside-free version is required for HAT and methotrexate-based selection systems.
• Essential vs Non-Essential Amino Acids in Cell CultureIn cell culture, an amino acid is called essential if cultured mammalian cells cannot make enough of it and it must be supplied in the medium - thirteen of them, the set Harry Eagle defined, including arginine, cystine, tyrosine and glutamine that are not classed as dietary essentials. The seven non-essential amino acids - glycine, alanine, asparagine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid, proline and serine - can be synthesised by most cells, and are supplied anyway because making them consumes carbon, ATP and reducing equivalents that would otherwise go into growth. A MEM NEAA 100X supplement contains all seven at 10 mM, giving 0.1 mM of each at working strength; add it to MEM or DMEM, which contain few or none, and leave it out of Ham's F-12, IMDM and DMEM/F-12, which already carry all seven.
• EMEM vs DMEM: What the Modification Actually ChangedEMEM (Eagle's Minimum Essential Medium, also sold as MEM) and DMEM (Dulbecco's Modified Eagle Medium) are the same medium one generation apart: DMEM is Eagle's formulation enriched, with roughly four times the vitamins, about twice most amino acids, twice the glutamine, added glycine and serine, ferric nitrate, and 3.7 g/L sodium bicarbonate against EMEM's 1.5-2.2 g/L. The practical consequence is that DMEM supports fast-growing, metabolically demanding lines such as HEK293 and NIH/3T3, while EMEM suits slower, less demanding adherent cells and primary lines - and because DMEM's higher bicarbonate is formulated for 10% CO2 while EMEM's suits 5%, the two are not interchangeable without checking your incubator.