MCF7 dose response

ErbB receptor ligands, epidermal growth factor (EGF) and heregulin (HRG), induce dose-dependent transient and sustained intracellular signaling, proliferation and differentiation of MCF-7 breast cancer cells, respectively. In an effort to delineate the ligand-specific cell determination mechanism, we investigated time-course gene expressions induced by EGF and HRG that induce distinct cellular phenotypes in MCF-7 cells. To analyze the effects of ligand dosage and time for the gene expression independently, we developed a statistical method for decomposing the expression profiles into the two effects. Our results indicated that signal transduction pathways devotedly convey quantitative properties of the dose-dependent activation of ErbB receptor to early transcription. The results also implied that moderate changes in the expression levels of numbers of genes, not the predominant regulation of a few specific genes, might cooperatively work at the early stage of the transcription for determining the cell fate. However, the EGF- and HRG-induced distinct signal durations resulted in the ligand-oriented biphasic induction of proteins after 20 min. The selected gene list and HRG-induced prolonged signaling suggested that transcriptional feedback to the intracellular signaling results in a graded to biphasic response in the cell determination process, and that each ErbB receptor is inextricably responsible for the control of amplitude and duration of cellular biochemical reactions.

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Nagashima T, Shimodaira H, Ide K, Nakakuki T, Tani Y, Takahashi K, Yumoto N, Hatakeyama M