Date

4-2015

Project Type

URC Presentation

College or School

COLSA

Class Year

Junior

Department

Molecular, Cellular and Biomedical Sciences

Major

Biomedical Science

Faculty Research Advisor

Paul Tsang

Abstract

In the United States, nearly 700,000 people are battling with brain tumors, e.g. gliomas. A common trait of tumors is angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels from pre-existing ones. Through angiogenesis, glioma cells are able to receive oxygen and nutrients to support their rapid growth. In order to better understand the process of tumor angiogenesis in gliomas, the current study seeks to characterize some of the angiogenic properties of the U373 glioma cell line by using zymography to determine the ability of these cells to produce matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and cell culture techniques to assess proliferation rate. Gelatin lytic activity was present in conditioned medium collected 2, 4, 8, 24 and 48 hours after fetal bovine serum was removed. Two enzyme species with relative molecular masses of approximately 70 and 89 kDa were detected, consistent with MMP2 and MMP9 family members, respectively. The 70 kDa species was detected in samples collected at all time points, while the 89 kDa species was detected only in samples collected at 24 and 48 hours. Preliminary results showed that mitotic activity was low for the first 48 hour of culture. Future work will determine the presence or absence of the angiogenesis-related protein, fibroblast growth factor.

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