DNA fingerprinting of the NCI-60 cell line panel

The National Cancer Institute's NCI-60 cell line panel, the most extensively characterized set of cells in existence and a public resource, is frequently used as a screening tool for drug discovery. Because many laboratories around the world rely on data from the NCI-60 cells, confirmation of their genetic identities represents an essential step in validating results from them. Given the consequences of cell line contamination or misidentification, quality control measures should routinely include DNA fingerprinting. We have, therefore, used standard DNA microsatellite short tandem repeats to profile the NCI-60, and the resulting DNA fingerprints are provided here as a reference. Consistent with previous reports, the fingerprints suggest that several NCI-60 lines have common origins: the melanoma lines MDA-MB-435, MDA-N, and M14; the central nervous system lines U251 and SNB-19; the ovarian lines OVCAR-8 and OVCAR-8/ADR (also called NCI/ADR); and the prostate lines DU-145, DU-145 (ATCC), and RC0.1. Those lines also show that the ability to connect two fingerprints to the same origin is not affected by stable transfection or by the development of multidrug resistance. As expected, DNA fingerprints were not able to distinguish different tissues-of-origin. The fingerprints serve principally as a barcodes. [Mol Cancer Ther 2009;8(4): 713-24]