Functional evidence for involvement of multiple putative tumor suppressor genes on the short arm of chromosome 3 in human oral squamous cell carcinogenesis.

Cytogenetic and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analyses have suggested that a putative tumor suppressor genes(s), which may play an important role in the development of human oral squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), is located on the short arm of chromosome 3 (3p). We previously reported that introducing in intact human chromosome 3 into three different oral SCC tumorigenic cell lines completely suppresses the tumorigenicity of each cell line with significant decrease in the in vitro growth rate and morphological changes. To map the tumor suppressor gene(s) on 3p, we have now examined the tumorigenicity of microcell hybrid clones containing various fragments derived from 3p that were introduced by microcell-mediated chromosome transfer. Sixteen hybrid clones were obtained from four successful experiments, and these clones were classified into two groups: 4 fully tumorigenic clones and 12 suppressed phenotype clones. Analyses of the 3p segments in the series of hybrid clones with the use of RFLP or microsatellite markers revealed that the 3p21.2-p21.3 or 3p25 regions or both were consistently retained in the 12 clones with suppressed phenotype but not in the 4 tumorigenic clones. The more proximal 3p13 region also was retained in three nontumorigenic clones. The overall results are fairly compatible with recent evidence that there are three discrete regions on 3p showing frequent allelic losses on oral SCC, and they directly provide functional evidence for the presence of tumor-suppressor genes for oral SCC in these regions. The possibility that three genes, FHIT, VHL, and T beta R-II, recently identified on 3p may be significantly involved in oral SCC development is also discussed.