LuCEMe: An accessible luciferase-based method to functionally assess cellular metabolism across model systems

LuCEMe is a luciferase-based metabolic phenotyping method that quantifies ATP after acute perturbations to resolve glycolytic versus mitochondrial dependencies in intact multicellular systems.

• Why it matters: Existing metabolic profiling often needs specialized equipment and typically cannot perform differential metabolic analysis in intact multicellular cultures or ex vivo samples without prior separation.
• What they did: The approach combines acute metabolic perturbations with quantitative ATP readouts, and can be adapted to distinguish glycolytic activity, glucose oxidation, and fatty acid/amino acid-driven mitochondrial ATP production.
• The result: In leukemia cocultures and during macrophage polarization, osteogenic/adipogenic differentiation, and T cell activation, LuCEMe detects distinct metabolic rewiring, and ex vivo it identifies a chemotherapy-associated metabolic adaptation in acute myeloid leukemia not evident from conventional analyses.

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