Establishment and Preliminary Characterization of Three Astrocytic Cells Lines Obtained from Primary Rat Astrocytes by Sub-Cloning.

Gliomas are complex and heterogeneous tumors that originate from the glial cells of the brain. The malignant cells undergo deep modifications of their metabolism, and acquire the capacity to invade the brain parenchyma and to induce epigenetic modifications in the other brain cell types. In spite of the efforts made to define the pathology at the molecular level, and to set novel approaches to reach the infiltrating cells, gliomas are still fatal. In order to gain a better knowledge of the cellular events that accompany astrocyte transformation, we developed three increasingly transformed astrocyte cell lines, starting from primary rat cortical astrocytes, and analyzed them at the cytogenet…