TY - JOUR T1 - Standard melanoma-associated markers do not identify the MM127 metastatic melanoma cell line JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/026633 SP - 026633 AU - Parvathi Haridas AU - Jacqui A. McGovern AU - Ahishek S. Kashyap AU - D. L. Sean McElwain AU - Matthew J. Simpson Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/09/11/026633.abstract N2 - Melanoma cell lines are an essential tool for melanoma research (Yu et al., 2015). Melanoma cells are routinely identified using antigens encoded by genes that are commonly expressed in melanocytes and melanoma cell lines (Urosevic et al., 2005). Common markers include: S100; HMB-45; and Melan-A (Viray et al., 2013). Our study explores the expression of these three markers in four different human melanoma cell lines: WM35; WM793; SK-MEL-28; and MM127. All melanoma cell lines we use are validated using short tandem repeat (STR) profiling (Cell Bank, Australia. January 2015). The alleles obtained from STR profiling are analysed using the DMSZ database (http://www.dsmz.de/fp/cgi-bin/str.html) to give the closest match to each cell line we consider. Results for the metastatic melanoma cell line, MM127, are not as expected since there is no match identified using the MM127 alleles (Figure 1A). We also examine the expression of S100; HMB-45 and Melan-A at both the mRNA and the protein level by performing immunofluorescence, Western blotting and quantitative real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) assays. Again, our results for the metastatic melanoma cell line, MM127, are not as expected. This cell line is not identifiable using any of the three markers. Since the MM127 cell line does not express any of the standard melanoma-associated markers, we suggest that it would be difficult to perform further melanoma-related experiments using this cell line, and that this cell line should be used with care. ER -