Screening and cloning of multi-drug resistant genes in HL-60/MDR cells

To screen and clone multi-drug resistance (MDR) related genes in MDR acute myeloid leukemia cells (HL-60/MDR).

HL-60/MDR was established using All-Trans Retinoic Acid. With the HL-60 cells as "tester" and HL60/MDR as "driver", the cDNA library of HL-60/MDR was established by suppression subtractive hybridization. Then 12 of the resulting subtracted cDNA clones were selected for DNA sequencing and homology analysis. The obtained expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were analyzed with the GenBank BLASTN program to identify sequence homologies to known genes.

The HL-60/MDR cells had different multi-drug resistance to six kinds of chemotherapeutic drugs. The 211 positive gene clones in differential cDNA library of HL-60/MDR cells were amplified with PCR and 46 gene clones exhibited differential expression (ratio >3). Twelve gene clones with significant differential expression (ratio >5) were screened out to homology analysis. Of these, 11 matched known genes and the rest 1 showed no significant homology to human or non-human known sequences. It was named as gene clone HA117.

This effort provides the partial list of genes differential expressed in HL-60/MDR cells and a novel gene HA117 was found to be related to MDR. Identification of these genes contributes to our understanding of MDR development, and potentially provides candidate target genes to overcome MDR.