Chemotactic response of SV40 virus transformed fibroblasts to conditioned medium: dependence on time and cell number.

The ability of tumor cells to move chemotactically in response to specific stimuli may be one of the many factors which distinguish malignant from non-malignant cells. In this work we demonstrated that a SV 40 virus transformed human fibroblast cell line (SV40/WI26) has an enhanced chemotactic response to fibroblast-conditioned medium (FCM) as compared to control human fibroblasts, and this was true for different migration times and different initial cell numbers. A similar behaviour has been described for SV40 transformed mouse fibroblasts (SV3T3). Furthermore, another SV40 transformed human fibroblast cell line (SV40/WI38) has been reported to have an enhanced chemotactic response to FCM compared to the normal counterpart. We conclude that the increased chemotactic response to FCM could be well correlated with the phenotype induced by fibroblast transformation with SV 40.