Marker polypeptide differences between spontaneous strongly and weakly metastatic cancer cells identified by...

A recent 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis study revealed several polypeptide differences between a strongly metastatic and a weakly metastatic clone from a single chemically induced murine fibrosarcoma (Jellum et al., 1984). To exclude the possibility that this was merely coincidental, the study is extended here to 2 other fibrosarcomas recently and similarly induced in mice of the same inbred strain. Metastatic potential was defined by the number of lung metastases spontaneously formed from a transplanted primary footpad tumor. One strongly (or moderately) metastatic cell line and I weakly metastatic line from each of the 3 fibrosarcomas were examined in the same experiments. In confirmation of our previous results, the same polypeptides consistently occurred in considerably greater amounts in the weakly metastatic than in the strongly metastatic cells. One of these marker polypeptides was absent from the strongly metastatic cell lines. In comparison with 2 of the 3 most metastatic lines, the third line was only moderately metastatic, and differed least strongly from the 3 weakly metastatic cell lines with regard to expression of th marker polypeptides. Marker polypeptide expression showed no consistent correlation with tumorigenicity. No other consistent polypeptide differences between strongly metastatic and weakly metastatic cells could be identified among the approximately 2,000 cellular polypeptides separated on the gels.