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Molecular Biology and Genetics |
The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, [F. B., K. W. K., B. V., C. L.] and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute [B. V.], Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21231; Institute of Anthropology and Human Genetics, University of Munich, Munich 80333, Germany [C. F., M. R. S.]; and Division of Biology and Medicine, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912 [A. D., J. M. S.]
| ABSTRACT |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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To rigorously test whether p53 deficiency caused measurable changes in the structural or numerical stability of chromosomes, we evaluated human cell lines whose p53 alleles were disrupted by gene targeting. By comparing these lines to parental cells containing wild-type p53 alleles, unambiguous assessments of the role of endogenous p53 in various forms of genetic instability could be made.
| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
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One allele of p53 was disrupted in lung-derived human fetal fibroblasts (FBp53HET) by homologous integration of a targeting vector. The remaining p53 allele was found to be lost in a subpopulation of cells that had an increased life span (FBp53KO), resulting in a p53 null cell line (6) . Fetal fibroblast cell lines were grown in Hams F-10 medium supplemented with 15% FCS, penicillin/streptomycin, and 2 mM glutamine.
FISH.
Methods for FISH analysis with chromosome-specific centromeric probes and quantitative analysis of chromosome loss rates have been described (7)
. To prepare metaphase spreads, cells were treated with 0.1 µg/ml Colcemid (KaryoMax; Life Technologies, Inc.) and processed by standard methods. Multiplex-FISH analysis was performed as described (8)
. The full karyotype of wild-type HCT116 cells (9)
was confirmed as 45,X,-Y, der(10)dup(10)(q24q26)t(10;16)(q26;q24), der(16)t(8;16)(q13;p13), der(18)t(17;18)(q21;p11.3).
SCE Assay.
Assays for SCE were performed essentially as described (10)
. Cells were grown in bromodeoxyuridine for 40 h, an interval in which chromatin was replicated twice. Differentially stained chromosomes were bleached under UV light and visualized under fluorescence. Individual exchanges between sister chromatids were scored manually.
Assay of Homologous Integration.
A targeting vector (pRV6.9 h) with a total of 6.9 kb of sequence homologous to a region encompassing exon 3 of the HPRT gene has been described previously (11)
and was modified for our experiments. The presence of both neomycin and hygromycin resistance markers in the HCT116 derivatives necessitated the construction of a version of this vector, designated pE3PUR, in which the neomycin transferase gene was replaced with a cassette encoding puromycin resistance.
All cell lines were passaged in medium supplemented with hypoxanthine/aminopterin/thymidine supplement (Life Technologies, Inc.) for 1015 generations. The targeting vector was introduced into cells using Lipofectamine (Life Technologies, Inc.). Resistant colonies were grown in 2.5 µg/ml puromycin for 5 days, at which time the medium was removed and exchanged with medium containing 6-TG (Sigma Chemical Co.). 6-TG-resistant clones were grown for an additional 10 days. Genomic DNA was purified by a spin column procedure (Qiagen), and homologous integration was assessed by PCR as described (11) .
| RESULTS |
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Losses and Gains of Specific Chromosomes.
The M-FISH assays described above show that the state of the chromosome complement was unchanged after p53 disruption. Such states cannot reliably be used to determine rates of chromosome changes, however. We therefore used FISH with probes for specific centromeric sequences to determine the precise rates of chromosome losses and gains in these cells. Immediately after targeting of the second p53 allele, five subclones were isolated by limiting dilution. These "knockout" cell lines (HCTp53KO.1, KO.2, and others), plus a sibling control line (HCTp53HET) that was heterozygous for p53 disruption, were serially passaged in parallel. Each clone was grown for 25 generations after its establishment, and 100 interphase cells were examined with probes for several different chromosomes. Previous examination of unstable cells with these probes revealed no apparent bias as to which chromosomes are lost or gained (7)
. No significant differences in the rate of loss or gain of single chromosomes were observed among the lines, whether or not intact p53 genes were present (Table 1)
. In particular, the number of cells that contained a chromosome number different from the modal number (two per autosome, one for the single X chromosome) was never >6%, regardless of p53 genotype. This high degree of stability is consistent with previous studies of wild-type HCT116 cells (7
, 14)
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8%, and there was no correlation of this number with p53 genotype. In contrast, 2530% of the cells with a CIN phenotype typically are found to lose or gain any tested chromosome, with a correspondingly higher variation in chromosome number from cell to cell (7)
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Interestingly, although the fibroblast lines with disrupted p53 genes did not show high rates of loss or gain of specific single chromosomes, these cells had a marked tendency to become tetraploid (Table 1)
. Thus, p53-deficient fibroblasts exhibited a high percentage of metaphases with four and occasionally eight markers per chromosome. Such effects have been noted in p53-deficient rodent fibroblast cells treated with inhibitors of mitotic spindle formation (19
, 20)
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No obvious tendency to tetraploidization was evident in our CIN assays of p53-deficient HCT116 cells (Table 1)
. However, inspired by the fibroblast results, we assessed a larger number of cells to determine whether any differences in tetraploidization occurred. In 400 metaphases from the p53-deficient cells, 35 exhibited tetraploidy (example in Fig. 1b
), whereas a smaller fraction (10 of 400) of parental HCT116 cells were tetraploid. This 3.5-fold difference in tetraploidization, although small, was statistically significant (P < 0.001,
2 test).
| DISCUSSION |
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One might legitimately ask whether the mismatch repair deficiency in HCT116 cells (21) may prevent the advent of CIN, even with p53 disrupted. This hypothesis has been excluded in recent experiments wherein it was demonstrated that the targeted disruption of hSecurin, a gene involved in the regulation of anaphase initiation, leads to marked chromosomal instability in HCT116 cells (14) . The securin-deficient cells were studied with some of the same assays used here to evaluate CIN.
Do these results therefore imply that p53 plays no role in maintaining chromosome stability? A conservative interpretation of our results is that p53 disruption alone does not cause chromosome instability. It remains possible that, in the presence of other genetic or epigenetic alterations, the absence of p53 could exacerbate a preexisting tendency toward such instability. For example, although we observed no CIN in the cell lines studied here, they exhibited a small but consistent tendency to become tetraploid in the two cell types studied. This tendency to polyploidy has been attributed to the loss of the G1 checkpoint function of p53 (22) , which prevents rereplication of the genome, and should be distinguished from CIN, in which individual chromosomes are gained or lost in a haphazard fashion (7) . It is unclear whether the tetraploid cells in either the HCTp53KO or the FBp53KO population maintain their proliferative potential, because we have not yet been able to recover tetraploid clones of any of these cells. Regardless, the difference in the frequencies of tetraploidization between the epithelial-derived cancer cells and the fibroblasts demonstrates that loss of p53 can have different consequences in different cell types. Such cell type differences as well as differences between murine and human cells may explain the discrepancies among previous studies (23 , 24) and those recorded here.
Previous studies have implicated p53-independent pathways in the development of chromosomal instability. Tetraploidy has been observed previously in human cells transduced with viral oncogenes, although not with those that interact directly with p53 (25) . Experiments with murine tumor models have suggested that other mutations in caretaker genes such as Brca1 (26) and Brca2 (27) can lead to instability in the context of p53 mutation.
Most importantly, we believe that our results convincingly demonstrate, in both normal human fibroblasts and human epithelial cancer cells, that p53 loss does not simply lead to aneuploidy. This conclusion is consistent with the previously documented existence of human diploid cancers (2 , 5) , as well as diploid murine experimental tumors (28) that contain mutant p53 genes. It is also consistent with observations on colorectal tumors showing that aneuploidy occurs early during the neoplastic process, whereas p53 inactivation occurs only decades later, near the transition from adenoma to carcinoma (29) . We conclude that the aneuploidy that is nearly ubiquitous in cancers should not be ascribed primarily to defects in p53, and that a continuing search for the central mediators of chromosomal instability is justified.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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| FOOTNOTES |
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1 This work was supported by the Clayton Fund, the V-Foundation, and NIH Grant CA 43460. ![]()
2 To whom requests for reprints should be addressed, at The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, CRB Room 585, 1650 Orleans Street, Baltimore, MD 21231. E-mail: lengauer{at}jhmi.edu ![]()
3 The abbreviations used are: CIN, chromosomal instability; FISH, fluorescence in situ hybridization; SCE, sister chromatid exchange; HPRT, hypoxanthine phosphoribosyl transferase; 6-TG, 6-thioguanine; HR, homologous recombination. ![]()
Received 6/13/01. Accepted 12/14/01.
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