Affiliations: [a] Department of Chemical Engineering and Center of Membrane Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA | [b] Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Kentucky Medical Center, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
Note: [] Accepted by: Editor L. Weiss
Abstract: A parallel-plate flow chamber was used to quantify the detachment of normal, transformed, and reverted rat fibroblasts from a confluent monolayer of normal fibroblasts. In this method, known shear stresses were applied to the adherent cells and the percent of cells detached from the monolayer was determined. Results indicate that the detachment of all cell types increased with increasing shear stress and detachment of highly metastatic ras-transformed cells was significantly higher than that of either nonmetastatic normal cells or transformed cells reverted with the Kirsten ras revertant (K-rev 1a) gene, which are lowly metastatic. From these results, it is concluded that a correlation exists between the metastatic phenotype of the cell and its ability to detach from normal cells.
