BioProject

Cellular plasticity confers cancer cells the ability to adapt to micro-environmental changes, a fundamental requirement for tumour progression and metastasis. More...

Cellular plasticity confers cancer cells the ability to adapt to micro-environmental changes, a fundamental requirement for tumour progression and metastasis. The epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a transcriptional programme associated with increased cell motility and stemness. Beside EMT, the mesenchymal to amoeboid transition (MAT) has been described during tumour progression but, to date, little is known about its transcriptional control and involvement in stemness. The aim of this study is to investigate (i) the transcriptional profile associated with the MAT programme and (ii) to study whether MAT acquisition in melanoma cancer cells correlate with clonogenic potential to promote tumor growth. Our results demonstrate that MAT programme in melanoma is characterised by increased stemness and clonogenic features of cancer cells, thus sustaining tumour progression. Furthermore, these data suggest that stemness is not an exclusive feature of cells undergoing EMT, but more generally is associated with an increase in cellular plasticity of cancer cells. Overall design: Hs294T in the presence of Ilomastat, Hs294T treated with the Rho activator Calpeptin and EphA2-overexpressing Hs294Tcells were obtained. Duplicate sample from 2 independent experiments were hybridized onto Human AffymetrixHuGene St 1.0 GeneChip array (Affymetrix). Less...