Effect of retinoic acid on plasminogen activator expression in human melanoma cells

The plasminogen activation system comprises various proteases that contribute to the invasive potential and metastatic spread of the tumour cell. Two such proteases are tissue-type (tPA) and urokinase-type (uPA) plasminogen activators. Both these enzymes convert plasminogen into the active zymogen plasmin, which has a broad substrate specificity and is capable of degrading a wide range of extracellular matrix molecules. In this study, we examined the effect of retinoic acid (RA) on uPA and tPA secretion in the highly metastatic C8161 and the poorly metastatic Hs294T human melanoma cell lines using a specific enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) detection system, and correlated this production with RA receptor (RAR) expression. Over a range of dilutions, we were able to show that the highly metastatic C8161 cells secreted 0.95 ng of uPA/cell compared with 4.41 fg/cell for the Hs294T cells, whereas the Hs294T cells secreted 24.5 fg of tPA/cell compared with 4.35 fg/cell for the C8161 cells. On exposure of the cells to RA (10(-10)-10(-5) M) for 4 days, uPA secretion was increased 3.4-fold in the C8161 cell line and 1.6-fold in the Hs294T cell line using 10(-8) M RA. In addition, tPA expression was increased in both cell lines by 3.7-fold in the C8161 cells and 3.8-fold in the Hs294T cells with 10(-6) M RA treatment. Increases in PA expression by RA have been reported to involve RAR alpha and RAR beta expression. We were able to detect RAR beta and gamma expression in both cell lines, with and without RA treatment, but were unable to detect expression of RAR alpha. This suggests that another mechanism must exist to regulate the RA modulation of tPA and uPA secretion in these cell lines that does not require RAR alpha expression.