Effect of HSP27 on Human Breast Tumor Cell Growth and Motility.
Abstract
This award is a Predoctoral Fellowship to support the training of Donna Egender (Housley). The goal of the research is to investigate the effects of the small heat shock protein, Hsp27, on growth and motility characteristics of human mammary tumor cell lines. Since Hsp27 regulates actin microfilament dynamics, we hypothesize that cells expressing high levels of Hsp27 will show increased motility and altered chemotactic properties, in addition to increased resistance to hyperthermic killing and to certain antitumor drugs. The development of stable transfected MB-MDA231 cell lines that express significantly elevated levels of Hsp27 has proven to be daunting. Down regulation of Hsp27 levels in MCF7 cells using antisense technology has also not been achieved because of toxic effects. In order to overcome these limitations, Donna spent much of the past year working with the adenovirus vector system. This approach was also found to give inadequate expression levels in mammary tumor cells. She has, therefor, returned to her original approach of selecting stable transformed cell lines by using plasmids containing high level constitutive promoters driving hsp27 expression. She has begun to analyze the 3 high level expressing cell lines already in hand with respect to stress resistance, growth. and motility.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA341515
Entities
People
- Eileen Hickey
Organizations
- University of Nevada, Reno