Hyperammonia and hypoxia induce relevant changes in lipid signals in 1 H NMR spectra from human cancer cells

The technique of NMR has provided new insights on cell metabolism in animals and humans, due to the capacity of studying biologically active molecules in intact cell systems. With this respect, the intense lipid signals attributed to fatty acid chains in neutral lipids have elicited much attention in the NMR community, aimed at providing new tools to improve the knowledge in lipid metabolism and correlate the spectral observations to biologically relevant events. We therefore studied the effects of hyperammonia and hypoxia conditions in tumour cells in culture in order to provide more insight on these lipid metabolites and possible changes in their synthesis.