Previously, we isolated cell lines that display various degrees of transformed phenotypes from a single-cell population of human diploid fibroblasts (RB) containing a large deletion (13q14-22) in one copy of chromosome 13. They included a cell line transfected with SV40 early genes (RBSV), an immortalized cell line (RBI), an anchorage-independent cell line (RBS), and a tumorigenic cell line (RBT). Here, we analyzed gene expression profiles in these cell lines and showed that expression of some fibroblast-specified or mesenchyme-specified genes were downregulated, and those of stem cell–specified genes, including NANOG, were upregulated during malignant progression. When NANOG expression was knocked down with a short hairpin NANOG expression vector (shNANOG vector) in the RBS and RBT cells, the anchorage independency and tumorigenicity were repressed. We next examined various cancer cell lines for NANOG expression and showed that some cancer cell lines expressed a high level of normal and/or variant NANOG proteins. Overexpression of NANOG mRNA in lung adenocarcinoma was also shown by in situ hybridization. All these data indicate the involvement of NANOG in tumorigenesis.
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