RNA in Fetal Bovine Serum Interferes with Cell Culture Studies

Fetal bovine serum (FBS) has been used in eukaryotic cell cultures for decades, and it represents one of the most commonly used reagents in life science research. However, little attention has been paid to the biological effects associated with RNA content of FBS on cell cultures. Here we report that FBS contains a diverse repertoire of protein-coding and regulatory RNA species, including mRNA, miRNA, rRNA, and snoRNA. The majority of them (>70%) are retained even after extended ultracentrifugation in the preparations of vesicle-depleted FBS (vdFBS) commonly utilized in the studies of extracellular vesicles (EV) and intercellular communication. FBS-associated RNA is co-isolated with cell-culture derived extracellular RNA (exRNA) and interferes with the downstream RNA analysis. Many evolutionally conserved FBS-derived RNA species can be falsely annotated as human or mouse transcripts. Notably, specific miRNAs abundant in FBS, such as miR-122, miR-451a and miR-1246, have been previously reported as enriched in cell-culture derived EVs, likely due to the confounding effect of the FBS. Furthermore, although the absolute amount of individual RNA species in FBS is low, they can be taken up by cultured cells and affect the results and interpretations of highly sensitive gene expression profiling technologies. Therefore, precautions for experimental design are warranted to minimize the interference and misinterpretations caused by FBS-derived RNA. Overall design: 3 FBS samples were ultracentifuged, then RNA from the pellets and supernatants were sequenced to examine what human/mouse RNA species they could be mis-annotated to.