Investigations of the mechanism of decreased tumorigenicity of cells grown in BrdU

✍ Scribed by Henry Rothschild; Paul H. Black

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1973
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 614 KB
• Volume: 81
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0021-9541
• DOI: 10.1002/jcp.1040810209

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Transplantable SV40‐transformed hamster cells cultivated in the presence of low concentrations of BrdU for prolonged periods of time and cells made deficient in the enzyme thymidine kinase (dTK) by continued exposure to BrdU became less tumorigenic. In both instances, when grown in BrdU the cells contained analog substituted DNA. The tumorigenicity of dTK^+^ cells exposed to low concentrations of BrdU, but not the dTK^−^ cells, returned to control values when the cells were grown in medium devoid of BrdU. A tumorigenic mouse cell line made dTK deficient also had diminished oncogenicity. However, transformed hamster cells made deficient in another salvage pathway enzyme, hypoxanthineguanine phosphoribosyl‐transferase by growth in eight azaguanine, retained their tumorigenicity. Two of five revertant cell lines, in which thymidine kinase activity was restored, transplanted more readily to hamsters than the dTK^−^ cells from which they were derived. It is concluded that there is a relative loss of tumorigenicity when BrdU is incorporated into the DNA of tumorigenic cell lines, or when there is a genetic modification of thymidine kinase activity.