An important consideration for production processes of recombinant therapeutics consists in appraising the risk of contamination by animal-derived products. Therefore, there is a strong trend to replace animal-derived ingredients from culture media with plant-derived ingredients in order to meet biosafety concerns and productivity demands. in this study, we assessed the effect of a rapeseed peptide fraction on the growth, metabolism and IFN-gamma production of CHO cells cultivated in batch processes. This fraction strongly increased not only CHO cell growth and survival (maximal cell density 2.4-fold and integral of viable cell density (IVCD) 4-fold) but also the quantity of IFN-gamma produced (5-fold) and its specific production rate (1.5-fold). The rates of glucose and glutamine consumption were dramatically reduced when the culture medium was supplemented with this particular fraction, without affecting their conversion into lactate and ammonia. The rapeseed fraction might be a source of nutrients as well as growth promoting and/or anti-apoptotic compounds. Finally, this work underlines the interest of using this fraction for facilitated adaptation of different industrial cell lines to serum-free conditions without compromising the cell growth. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.