前沿科技及其它

The preparation of cells from heavily contaminated tissue is challenging. It is usually best to avoid such specimens if possible, but for the study of colorectal and some other tumours, it is inevitable that this must be overcome. The best methods seem to use a combination of (1) debridement of necrot ...

Clonal variants or subpopulations have been isolated from every major histological type of cancer, and cellular heterogeneity in lung cancer is a common occurrence. These subpopulations may exhibit differences in drug resistance and invasive potential. One therefore needs to con ...

Poor cell culture practice leads to poor science due largely to issues of cross-contamination between cell lines and of microbial contamination, but can be avoided by careful quality control and good laboratory practice. This chapter provides a brief and practical outline of the steps nee ...

The advent of continuous human leukemia–lymphoma cell lines as a rich resource of abundant, accessible, and manipulable living cells has contributed significantly to a better understanding of the pathophysiology of hematopoietic tumors. The first leukemia–lymphoma cell lines ...

Antiangiogenic drugs have been used successfully for the treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC) and several other tumor types. Until recently, viable tumor endothelial cells (TEC) and normal endothelial cells of uninvolved colon tissue (NEC) from the same patient have not been available ...

Inflammatory cells are present in many tumours, and understanding their function is of increasing importance, particularly to studies of tumour immunology. The tumour-infiltrating leukocytes encompass a variety of cell types, e.g. T lymphocytes, macrophages, dendritic cells, NK ...

Data on cell viability have long been obtained from in vitro cytotoxicity assays. Today, there is a focus on markers of cell death, and the MTT cell survival assay is widely used for measuring cytotoxic potential of a compound. However, a comprehensive evaluation of cytotoxicity requires addit ...

The process of carcinogenesis involves a number of changes in cellular phenotype, which are largely based on acquired genetic changes in cells that are not terminally differentiated. The ability of cancer cells to grow and their failure to respond to the usual controls on such proliferation a ...

The ATP-based tumor chemosensitivity assay (ATP–TCA) is a standardised system which can be adapted to a variety of uses with both cell lines and primary cell cultures. It has a strong track record in drug development, mechanistic studies of chemoresistance and as an aid to clinical decision-mak ...

Differential Staining Cytotoxicity (DiSC) assay is the prototype for a closely related family of assays based on the concept of total cell kill, or, in other words, cell death occurring in the entire population of tumor cells. It is probably the most versatile of the cell-death end points, in that it (1) can ...

Validation of new therapeutic targets calls for the advance in innovative assays that probe both spatial and temporal relationships in signaling networks. Cell death assays have already found a widespread use in pharmacological profiling of anticancer drugs. Such assays are, howev ...

Cell death by apoptosis has been studied for many years using fluorescently labeled annexin V. Annexin V shows high affinity for the phosphatidylserine that becomes enriched in the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane during apoptosis, but not necrosis, allowing differentiation betw ...

The Single Cell Gel Electrophoresis (Comet) assay is a simple, versatile and sensitive method for measuring DNA damage in individual cells, allowing the determination of heterogeneity of response within a cell population. The basic alkaline technique described is for the determinat ...

With conventional cytogenetic screening by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) using genomic tilepath clones, identification of genes in oncogenic chromosome translocations is often laborious, notably if the region of interest is gene-dense. Conventional molecul ...

A number of in vitro assays have been developed to study tumor cell motility. Historically, assays have been mainly monocellular, where carcinoma cells are studied in isolation. Scratch assays can be used to study the collective and directional movement of populations of cells, whereas two c ...

Measurement of DNA content was one of the first applications to be developed in the use of flow cytometry and is still used routinely in many experimental and, to a lesser extent, clinical studies. The goal of this technique is to produce a high quality DNA profiles for accurate analysis of DNA content and c ...

Homeobox genes code for transcription factors which have a strong impact on cellular behavior, including differentiation, proliferation, and survival. Therefore, upon deregulation these genes may turn into oncogenes, contributing substantially to cancerogenesis. Among ...

The basics of cell culture are now relatively common, though it was not always so. The pioneers of cell culture would envy our simple access to manufactured plastics, media and equipment for such studies. The prerequisites for cell culture are a well lit and suitably ventilated laboratory with a lam ...

Anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) is abnormally expressed in anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) and its expression associated with chromosomal translocations involving the ALK gene at 2p23. These translocations lead to the synthesis of novel chimeric proteins that retain the C- ...

Determining the clonal origins of malignant B-cells will have an impact on disease understanding and management. In this regard, immunoglobulin variable (V) region gene analysis already is having a significant impact in delineating the tumor cell of origin. It can identify, among other fe ...