Subcellular metabolite profiles of the parent CCRF-CEM and the derived CEM/C2 cell lines after treatment with doxorubicin.

Micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography with laser-induced fluorescence detection was used to detect the differences in doxorubicin metabolite accumulation in four subcellular fractions isolated from the CCRF-CEM and the CEM/C2 human leukemia cell lines. Five fluorescent metabolites and doxorubicin make up the metabolite profile of these cell lines upon treatment with 10 microM doxorubicin for 12 h, cell lysis, and fractionation by differential centrifugation. Based on the relative electrophoretic mobility of synthetic standards, we tentatively identify one metabolite as 7-deoxydoxorubicinone and suggest that doxorubicinone is not among those metabolites detected. Although the obvious difference between the derived cell line (CEM/C2) and the parent cell line (CCRF-CEM) is the decreased topoisomerase I activity in the former, the results presented here indicate that each cell line has a unique distribution of metabolites in each one of four subcellular fractions: nuclear-enriched, heavy-organelle-enriched, light-organelle-enriched, and cytoplasmic fractions.