tumor-like phenotype in three-dimensional basement membrane culture

Background: MCF-10A cells are near diploid and normal human mammary epithelial cells. In three-dimensional reconstituted basement membrane culture, they undergo a well-defined program of proliferation, differentiation, and growth arrest, forming acinar structures that recapitulate many aspects of mammary architecture in vivo. The pre-malignant MCF-10AT cells and malignant MCF-10CA1a lines were sequentially derived from the MCF-10A parental cell line first by expression of a constitutively active T24 H-Ras generating the MCF-10AT cell line. This was followed by repeated selection for increasingly aggressive tumor formation from cells recovered from xenograft tumors in immuno-compromised mice, generating the MCF-10CA1a cell line. When inoculated subcutaneously into the flanks of immuno-compromised mice, MCF-10AT cells occasionally form tumors, whereas MCF-10CA1a cells invariably form tumors with a shorter latency than MCF-10AT derived tumors. Results: MCF-10AT cells grown in three-dimensional basement membrane culture form complex multi-acinar structures that produce a basement membrane but undergo delayed cell cycle arrest and have incomplete luminal development. MCF-10CA1a cells grown in three-dimensional basement membrane culture form large, hyper-proliferative masses, that retain few characteristics of MCF10A acini and more closely resemble tumors. Conclusion: Here we report on the growth and differentiation properties of these three matched cell lines in three-dimensional basement membrane culture. Features of tissue morphogenesis were assessed, including proliferation, basement membrane formation, polarization of alpha-6 beta-4 integrin to the basement membrane, formation of cell:cell junctions, and apoptosis for luminal clearance. The matched series of normal MCF-10A, pre-malignant MCF-10AT, and malignant MCF10CA1a cells offers a unique opportunity to study the mechanisms of malignant progression both in a three-dimensional microenvironment and in the same cell background. Published: 16 March 2009 Cancer Cell International 2009, 9:7 doi:10.1186/1475-2867-9-7 Received: 9 January 2009 Accepted: 16 March 2009 This article is available from: http://www.cancerci.com/content/9/1/7 © 2009 Imbalzano et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.