Establishment and charaterization of normal and transformed fetal rat urogenital sinus mesenchymal cells: a comparative study

Hong, Sung Joon; Lee, Jin Moo

Abstract

Experiment on fetal urogenital sinus mesenchyme is invaluable to investigate the role of which stromal-epithelial interaction plays in the proliferation, differentiation and hormonal dependence of normal epithelial tissue as well as epithelial tumors. Normal and transformed embryonic fibroblast may have different effect on epithelial tumors. We have recently established normal (NUGM) and spontaneously transformed fetal rat urogenital sinus mesenchymal cell (TUGM) lines and herein present comparative characteristics of these cell lines including cytokinetic study, chromosomal study, effect of sex hormones on the growth, immunohistochemical study for intermediate filaments and in vivo tumorigenicity. TUGM has cellular characteristics of transformed fibroblast and shows increased expression of cell surface fibronectin. Addition of different concentration of serum and various sex hormones did not affect the growth of TUGM significantly, whereas in TUGM, The growth was significantly enhanced by increase of serum concentration in medium and dihyrotestosterone at the concentration of 100 ng/ml of medium. NUGM does not show any tumorigenicity in vivo. TUGM shows strong tumorigenicity (19/21) and forms fibrosarcoma when inoculated into nude mouse. The size of tumor was significantly smaller when inoculated into castrated male and female mice compared to non castrated males. In conclusion, NUGM and TUGM have different cellular characteristics and hormonal dependence. NUGM and TUGM may be help to elucidate the relative role of normal and transformed embryonic fibroblast in the mechanism of evolution, invasion and metastasis of epithelial cancer.