We observed the expression of wild-type retinoblastoma protein (RB) in all 17 hematologic cultured cell lines tested. However, no p16INK4 expression was detected in any cell line among 16 leukemia/lymphoma cell lines, although an EBV-transformed cell line expressed p16INK4. The expression levels of cyclin D1 and CDK4 varied widely among the cell lines. The correlation coefficient (r2) between doubling time (DT) and cyclin D1 in the 14 cell lines that doubled within 47.2 h was 0.4856, while the r2 between DT and cyclin dependent kinase 4 (CDK4) and that between DT and RB among those cell lines were 0.3761 and 0.0874, respectively. The levels of protein expression in vincristine (VCR)-resistant cell lines was not different from those in corresponding wild-type cell lines. Thus, we concluded that the loss of p16INK4 protein and inactivation of RB protein could be an essential step for oncogenesis of leukemia/ lymphoma, and that cyclin D1 may possibly be a target protein to control cell growth of hematologic cell lines which lack the expression of p16INK4.

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