Inhibitory Effect of Sodium Selenite on Microsatellite Instability of RER+ Colorectal Cancer Cells

Objective Investigation of the effects of sodium selenite on genetic instability of human tumor cells via its role in alteration of microsatellite sequence(MS) of RER+ (replication error) colon cancer cell line. Methods RER+ and RER- human colon cancer cell lines, RKO or SW480, were used as hosts for lipofection with pcmv-car in which a foreign(CA)14 repeat was inserted in the coding sequence of LacZ reporter gene, resulting in misreading LacZ frame. Any mutation which makes the base number of (CA)14 tract to be 3-fold will resume the normal reading frame of the reporter gene, and thus lead to expression and production of bioactive β-galactosidase. To test the effect of selenite on MI(microsatellite instability) of tumor cells, a series of concentrations of selenite were administered in cell culture in vitro. Variable expression of bioactive β-galactosidase of transfectant cells resulted from selenite administration was measured by A reading at λ410 after X-gal staining; Results Mutations of the exogenous(CA)14 developed and maintained in pcmv-car transfectant RKO cells but not in SW480 cells. It was found that blue cell frequency of RKO transfectant cells was markedly reduced after incubation of cells with 5 μmol/L of selenite for 5 days, at which concentration it was not toxic to cell growth. However, selenite at lower concentration of 1μmol/L didn′t exhibit suppression of blue cell rate until cell′s exposure to it for a longer period up to 5 weeks or more. Conclusion Our data showed that selenite displayed inhibitory effect on MI of human cancer cells and thus demonstrated its beneficial role in stabilization of human genomic DNA.