Dissociation between early loss of actin fibres and subsequent cell death in serum-deprived quiescent Balb/c-3T3 cells. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Serum withdrawal from either growing or quiescent Balb/c-3T3 murine fibroblasts causes a loss of F-actin fibres and focal adhesions within 30 min. Cells that are growing survive serum deprivation, whereas the great majority of density-arrested quiescent cells die during a period of up to 5 h from serum withdrawal. During this time an approximately constant fraction of the quiescent cell population dies per unit time. The population half-life is 60-70 min during this time. Addition of an appropriate cell growth factor or second messenger agonist at the time of serum withdrawal or within 2 h after serum withdrawal protects a similar fraction of viable cells. These findings suggest a model according to which withdrawal of serum (i.e. growth factors) initiates the death process in cells of the population with kinetics that approximate first-order kinetics. We postulate that appropriate growth factors or second messenger agonists block the initiating event that starts the cell death process.

publication date

  • November 1, 1992

Research

keywords

  • Actins
  • Cell Death

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0027077667

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1016/0898-6568(92)90048-d

PubMed ID

  • 1283311

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 4

issue

  • 6