A simple in vitro tumor chemosensitivity assay based on cell penetrating peptide tagged luciferase

PLoS One. 2017 Nov 10;12(11):e0186184. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186184. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

The analysis of intracellular ATP can reveal the response of cells to different treatments and is important for individualized medicine. In the present study, we developed a cell penetrating peptides (CPPs) tagged luciferase (TAT-LUC) for tumor chemosensitivity assay. The activity of recombinant TAT-LUC was evaluated using ATP standard solution and tumor cells. This recombinant TAT-LUC was then used for the analysis of sensitivity index (SI) of four strains of tumor cells. The results showed that TAT-LUC could detect less than 10 nM extracellular ATP with a strong correlation between the luminescence intensity and the ATP content (R2 = 0.994). Without cell lysis, the detection limit for intracellular ATP analysis was 40 tumor cells. Furthermore, chemosensitivity of four strains of tumor cells (Skov-3/DDP, A549/DDP, MDA-MB-231, Huh-7) was determined by this assay successfully. The cell penetration ability of TAT-LUC enables the assay not only to reflect drug resistance of tumor cells real-timely but also to minimize the test time, which can be a valuable aid for personalized cancer chemotherapy.

MeSH terms

  • Cell Line, Tumor
  • Cell-Penetrating Peptides / metabolism*
  • Cloning, Molecular
  • Drug Resistance, Neoplasm
  • Humans
  • Luciferases / metabolism*

Substances

  • Cell-Penetrating Peptides
  • Luciferases

Grants and funding

This study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81602608) to Zhiyuan Fang and the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program 2013CB967100) to Lingwen Zeng.