Department of Biomedicine, University of Bergen, Jonas Lies vei 91, N-5020 Bergen, Norway.
Exp Cell Res. 2012 Mar 10;318(5):441-3. doi: 10.1016/j.yexcr.2011.12.009. Epub 2011 Dec 27.
There is at present a controversy in the literature whether MSCs are susceptible to spontaneous in vitro transformation or not. Several groups have reported spontaneous transformation of MSCs from various species. However, some of these reports were not true transformations and later proven to be due to cross-contaminating cancer cells. To date there is no solid evidence that MSCs can undergo spontaneous transformation in culture. Only two groups used DNA fingerprinting to authenticate their transformed cells, and both groups later showed cross-contamination of cancer cells in their cultures. In this commentary, we address the paper "Spontaneous transformation of adult mesenchymal stem cells from cynomolgus macaques in vitro" by Z. Ren et al. Exp. Cell Res. 317 (2011) 2950-2957. In this article the authors characterize the transformed mesenchymal cells (TMCs) and claim to have verified their origin. We question the authentication of the TMCs made by the authors and we also believe it is in the interest of the scientific community, that a highly controversial finding, such as spontaneous transformation of MSCs, should be properly verified by stringent methods, preferably DNA fingerprinting, in order to validate if an actual transformation event has occurred.
目前，文献中存在关于间充质干细胞（MSCs）是否易自发体外转化的争议。有几个研究小组报告了来自不同物种的 MSCs 自发转化。然而，其中一些报告并非真正的转化，后来被证明是由于癌细胞的交叉污染。迄今为止，尚无确凿证据表明 MSCs 在培养中会自发转化。只有两个小组使用 DNA 指纹图谱来验证其转化细胞，但这两个小组后来都显示出培养物中存在癌细胞的交叉污染。在这篇评论中，我们讨论了 Z. Ren 等人在《实验细胞研究》（Exp. Cell Res.）杂志上发表的论文“食蟹猴成体间充质干细胞体外自发转化”。在这篇文章中，作者描述了转化的间充质细胞（TMCs），并声称已经验证了它们的起源。我们对作者所做的 TMC 鉴定提出质疑，我们也认为，科学界应该采用严格的方法（最好是 DNA 指纹图谱）来验证这样一个极具争议的发现，例如 MSCs 的自发转化，以确认是否发生了实际的转化事件。
