Expression data from E0771 mouse mammary tumor cell line and its derivative with high metastatic potential. Expression data from E0771 mouse mammary tumor cell line and its derivative with high metastatic potential

A distinct type of macrophages helps breast cancer cells to overcome rate-limiting steps in the metastatic process and establish lethal metastatic tumors. Since only a minor population of cancer cells can establish macroscopic metastatic tumors, we hypothesized that this metastatic cancer cell population have higher expression of receptors for macrophage-derived ligands compared to their parental cells. We used microarrays to investigate this hypothesis, and identified that a selected population of mouse mammary tumor cells with high metastatic potential had higher expression of Met, a gene encoding hepatocyte growth factor receptor. Overall design: To obtain cancer cell subpopulations with high metastatic potential, we injected E0771 mouse mammary tumor cells into the mammary fat pad of syngeneic C57BL/6 mice and retrieved the metastasized cells from the lung. We repeated this in vivo selection and established second-generation populations (named E0771-HML2). Total RNA was extracted from E0771-HML2 and their parental cells (E0771-parental) in culture, and hybridized on Affymetrix GeneChip Mouse Genome 430 2.0 Array.