| Abstract |
Cytokeratins purified by in vitro reassembly were extracted from normal
human oesophageal cells, plantar stratum corneum, three oesophageal
carcinoma cell lines and a pharyngeal carcinoma cell line. Two-dimensional
electrophoresis and polypepticle mapping showed clearly that the
cytokeratins produced by the carcinoma cell lines bore little relationship
to their normal counterparts, although immunoprecipitation experiments
yielded evidence of shared antigenic determinants. Comparison with a
mesothelial cell line indicated that the carcinoma cells produced a
cytokeratin subset of three to four components which were highly typical
of simple, rather than strattfied, epithelial cells. Nonetheless, the
carcinoma lines still retained the ability to form cell envelopes, a
characteristic of stratified epithelial cells, when cultured in suspension.
The unusual cytoskeleton profile expressed by these neoplastic cells is
probably not the result of in vitro modulation of subunit expression. An
alternative explanation is that they are the product of a discrete cell
population present in a heterogeneous tumour mass.
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