Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Stomatological Hospital, Chongqing Medical University, ChongQing, PR China.
Mol Med Rep. 2012 Apr;5(4):1116-20. doi: 10.3892/mmr.2012.781. Epub 2012 Feb 3.
Accumulating data reveal that aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity is a cancer stem cell marker in several types of human cancers. Whether ALDH also defines cancer stem cells of tongue squamous cell carcinoma is unknown. In the present study, we performed the Aldefluor assay to detect ALDH enzymatic activity, and used flow cytometry to isolate ALDH+ and ALDH- cells based on their ALDH activity in the Tca8113 tongue squamous cell carcinoma cell line. We found that Tca8113 cells harbored 1.3% of ALDH+ cells, which exhibited higher proliferation capacity than their ALDH- counterparts and parental cells. Sorted ALDH+ cells were able to differentiate and generate ALDH- cells in vitro. Moreover, in serum-free medium, ALDH+, but not ALDH- cells, survived and formed tumorspheres. The suppression subtractive hybridization assay revealed 68 overexpressed or underexpressed genes in the ALDH+ subpopulation relative to ALDH- cells, which included a set of known cancer stem cell-related genes. Thus, our data demonstrated that a small subset of Tca8113 cells with high ALDH enzymatic activity display characteristics of cancer stem cells, suggesting that ALDH activity may be a cancer stem cell marker for tongue squamous cell carcinoma.
积累的数据表明，醛脱氢酶（ALDH）活性是多种人类癌症中的癌症干细胞标志物。ALDH 是否也定义了舌鳞状细胞癌的癌症干细胞尚不清楚。在本研究中，我们进行了 Aldefluor 测定法来检测 ALDH 酶活性，并使用流式细胞术根据其在 Tca8113 舌鳞状细胞癌细胞系中的 ALDH 活性来分离 ALDH+和 ALDH-细胞。我们发现 Tca8113 细胞含有 1.3%的 ALDH+细胞，其增殖能力高于其 ALDH-对应物和亲本细胞。分选的 ALDH+细胞能够在体外分化并产生 ALDH-细胞。此外，在无血清培养基中，ALDH+ 细胞而不是 ALDH-细胞能够存活并形成肿瘤球。抑制性消减杂交分析显示，与 ALDH-细胞相比，ALDH+亚群中过表达或低表达的基因有 68 个，其中包括一组已知的癌症干细胞相关基因。因此，我们的数据表明，具有高 ALDH 酶活性的 Tca8113 细胞的一小部分具有癌症干细胞的特征，这表明 ALDH 活性可能是舌鳞状细胞癌的癌症干细胞标志物。
