Expression data from the different EMT and stemness status of lung cancer cell lines

To study the drug resistant phenotype between stem-like cancer cells at different EMT status, we isolated 4 subpopulations from the non-small-cell lung cancer cell line (PC14) according to the E-cadherin and CD133 expression level. We demonstrated that the epithelial type CD133high stem-like cells (E-cadhighCD133high) significantly exhibited higher drug resistant ability compared to the mesenchymal type CD133high stem-like cells (E-cadlowCD133high), epithelial type CD133low non-stem like cells (E-cadhighCD133low) and mesenchymal type CD133low non-stem like cells (E-cadlowCD133low). We used microarray to study the global gene expression profiles of these 4 subpopulations and identified distinct classes of up-regulated genes and down-regulated genes in the epithelial type CD133high stem-like cells. A two-step fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) method was used to isolate the epithelial and mesenchymal types of stem-like cancer cells. First, the E-cadhigh and E-cadlow subpopulations were isolated from PC14 cell line. Genotypic characterization confirmed the homology of the subpopulations. Next, the CD133high and CD133low cells were isolated from the E-cadhigh and E-cadlow subpopulations by using the human CD133 P1-promoter-driven GFP reporter lentiviral vector. Finally, we obtained the 4 subpopulations (E-cadhighCD133high, E-cadlowCD133high, E-cadhighCD133low and E-cadlowCD133low cells) for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays.