Abstract
Established cancer cell lines are routinely used to study cancer. Several factors such as serial passage may affect the reproducibility of experiments with cancer cell lines, but few researches focused on these changes. In the present study, different morphology and decreased tumorigenicity were observed in late passage U87MG cells. In vitro experiments further revealed that late passage U87MG cells possessed lower invasion properties than early passage, whereas no significant differences of proliferation and migration were found between early and late passage U87MG cells. In particular, we confirmed that late passage U87MG cells exhibited more epithelial phenotype with decreased PI3K/Akt pathway and TGF-β pathway expressions at protein level. In summary, our results focused on the changes of U87MG cells during serial in vitro passage, suggested that passage-induced changes may lead to notable changes of biological characteristics and several molecular transitions in cancer cell lines, indicating the necessity to shorten experiment-span and accomplish experiments with the same or similar passage cancer cell strains.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Nature Science Fund of China (No. 81502178, 81502177, 81760450), Natural Science Fund of Guangdong Province, China (No. 2016A030313549), Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou, China (No. 201607010350), Knowledge Innovation Program of Shenzhen (No. JCYJ20170307110825922).
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SQ and YS conceived and designed the experiments; YZ and JW performed the experiments; XW, RY, and HL performed the analysis; QL and ZZ contributed to references collecting; YZ and JW contributed to writing. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zeng, Y., Wang, X., Wang, J. et al. The Tumorgenicity of Glioblastoma Cell Line U87MG Decreased During Serial In Vitro Passage. Cell Mol Neurobiol 38, 1245–1252 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10571-018-0592-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10571-018-0592-7