Ultrastructural morphology of cells transformed with temperature-sensitive mutant of Mo-MuSV

Abstract

It is known that one of the abnormal behavior of cancer cells is changes in morphology. There is very little information in the literature on the morphological aspects of cell lines at the electron microscopic level transformed by viral mos gene (Culp, 1971; Hynes et al., 1978; Brown et al., 1981; Arlinghaus, 1985; Terasaki et al., 1986). NRK-6m2 is a cell line infected with a temperature sensitive mutant (tsll0) of Moloney murine sarcoma virus (Arlinghaus, 1985). The attempt in this study is to examine the ultrastructure of NRK-6m2 cells and relate the morphological changes to gag-mos induced cellular transformation.NRK-6m2 cell cultures were maintained in McCoy's 5a medium supplemented with 15% fetal calf serum. Subconfuluent cells were washed twice in cold phosphate buffered saline and fixed in situ in 1% glutaraldehyde, scraped and centrifuged at 1500 g for 5 min at 4°C, post fixed in osmium tetroxided and processed for electron microscopic study. Silver sections were stained with uranyl acetate and lead citrate and examined on a Joel 1200 EX electron microscope.