The International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200030, P.R. China.
Oncol Rep. 2010 May;23(5):1277-84. doi: 10.3892/or_00000761.
The concept of cancer stem cells (CSCs) provides a new paradigm for understanding cancer biology. Here we report how culture conditions affect the characteristics of primary ovarian cancer cells. Cancer cells disaggregated from ovarian serous adenocarcinoma and maintained in serum-free system culture formed sphere cells that exhibited several properties expected for CSCs. These include self-renewal, overexpression of stemness genes as detected by QPCR analysis, greater tumorigenicity and enhanced drug resistance. The serum-free culture system enriched the percentage of CD133+/CD117+ expressing cells in sphere cells as determined by flow cytometric analysis, immunostaining and Western blot analysis. A cDNA microarray showed that there were 2111 genes exhibiting more than a 2-fold difference in expression. Subsequent ontological analysis revealed that a large proportion of the classified genes were related to cell communication, cell-cell adhesion, cellular development and extracellular matrix. We suggest that the sphere cell subpopulation may be a more reliable model than differentiated cells grown in the presence of serum for understanding the biology of primary ovarian cancer.
癌症干细胞（CSC）的概念为理解癌症生物学提供了新的范例。在这里，我们报告培养条件如何影响原发性卵巢癌细胞的特征。从卵巢浆液性腺癌中分离出来并在无血清系统培养中培养的癌细胞形成了球体细胞，这些球体细胞表现出许多被认为是 CSC 的特性。这些特性包括自我更新、通过 QPCR 分析检测到的干细胞基因的过表达、更强的致瘤性和增强的耐药性。无血清培养系统通过流式细胞术分析、免疫染色和 Western blot 分析富集了球体细胞中 CD133+/CD117+表达细胞的百分比。cDNA 微阵列显示有 2111 个基因的表达差异超过 2 倍。随后的本体分析表明，分类基因的很大一部分与细胞通讯、细胞-细胞黏附、细胞发育和细胞外基质有关。我们认为，与在存在血清的情况下生长的分化细胞相比，球体细胞亚群可能是更可靠的模型，可用于理解原发性卵巢癌的生物学。
