Fas/APO-1 Gene Transfection Of Human Esophageal Cancer Cells And Induction Of Apoptosis In Fas/APO-1-transfected Cells

Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is a physiological mechanism of cell death occurring in embriogenesis, metamorphosis, endocrine-dependent tissue atrophy and normal tissue. It has increasingly been recognized in recent years that malignancy may not exclusively result from enhanced cell proliferation, but also from decreased physiological cell death, apoptosis. Fas/APO-1 is a cell surface protein known to trigger apoptosis in a variety of cell types upon binding specific antibody or its physiological ligand. Further studies on Fas/APO-1 will elucidate the molecular mechanisms of apoptosis, and may probably provide a new therapeutic strategy for the management of human malignant tumors. This study consists of three major parts including:1.We studied the expression of Fas/APO-1 and Fas mRNA using immunohistochemistry (IHC) and RT-PCR methods in 32 cases of human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma specimens and 10 cases of adjacent normal tissue specimens. The results of IHC showed that the rates of positive expression of Fas protein were 12.5%(1/8,WHO grade â…  ), 50%(5/10,WHO grade â…¡) and 57.1%(8/14,WHO grade â…¢)...