Effect of therapeutic doses of ionising radiation on the somatomammotroph pituitary cell line, GH3.

Abstract

Ionising radiation is used for the treatment of pituitary tumours as fractionated radiotherapy, where the total dose reaching the tumour area is in the range of 40-50 Gy, or during stereotactic radiosurgery, where the total dose reaching the tumour area during one session is in the range of 20-90 Gy. In this study, we investigated the effect of ionising radiation of (60)Co (dose rate of 3 Gy/min, similar to that used during gamma knife procedure) on the mode of cell death of the somatomammotroph pituitary cell line, GH3, an immortalized cell line derived from a rat pituitary adenoma. We found that the basic mechanism of cell death induced by irradiation of this GH3 cell line by gamma-rays was programmed cell death-apoptosis. Doses of 20-50 Gy were shown to inhibit proliferation in these cells. 24 hours after irradiation with a dose of 20 and 50 Gy, cells were shown to accumulate in the G(2)/M phase of cell cycle. This cell cycle arrest lasted for at least ten days. Apoptosis was detected 72 hours towards until the end of the study (10 days). However, a significant number of cells were still alive ten days following irradiation. We conclude that ionising radiation doses of 20 and 50 Gy induce pituitary GH3 cell apoptosis following cell cycle arrest in the G(2)/M phase.