Correlation between tumor cell migration and formaldehyde levels revealed by fluorescence imaging

Abstract

Tumor metastasis is one of the biggest challenges in oncology treatment today and is the leading cause of death for patients with all types of cancers. Formaldehyde is known to be closely associated with the progression of tumors. Therefore, studying the relationship between tumor migration and formaldehyde is conducive to further understanding the tumor development process and is essential for developing new drugs and tumor therapy. Toward this end, we developed a novel formaldehyde fluorescent probe (CM-FA-1) to detect the changes in formaldehyde during tumor cell migration. The cell imaging experiments have demonstrated the ability of CM-FA-1 to detect exogenous and endogenous formaldehyde in living cells. Subsequently, we validated the capacity of the probe CM-FA-1 to screen tumor cells and selectively identify formaldehyde in tumor cells. Significantly, the elevated formaldehyde levels were found for the first time during hypoxia-induced tumor cell migration, which was further validated in the bidirectional experiments treated with LRes (promotes cell migration) or HRes (inhibits cell migration). To our knowledge, this is the first time that a close link between tumor cell migration and formaldehyde levels has been revealed. We anticipate that the findings will provide worthwhile insights for the metastasis prevention, early tumor diagnosis and treatment of metastatic disease.