Search

The change of cell mobility is one of the preconditions of tumor metastasis. Cell skeleton alteration and rearrangement of F-actin was closely related to cell mobility. Ezrin is a membrane-cytoskeleton organizer that can mediate the rearrangement and the function of F-actin. In this paper, we investigated the effect of ezrin on hepatocellullar carcinoma cell growth and invasiveness. Hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines such as MHCC-1, MHCC97-H, SF7721, SMMC7721, Hep3B, and HepG2 were chosen in this study. We first examined the expression and the distribution of ezrin and F-actin in these cell lines using immunofluorescence, RT–PCR, and the western blot. Next we used small interfering RNA (siRNA) to down-regulate ezrin expression in MHCC-1, MHCC97-H, SF7721, and HepG2 to investigate the role of ezrin in tumor cell growth and invasiveness. Our preliminary results showed that the expression of ezrin and γ-actin in MHCC-1, MHCC97-H, and SF7721 with higher metastatic potential were obviously up-regulated than those in SMMC7721, Hep3B, and HepG2 with lower potential. No different expression of β-actin was found in the above tumor cell lines. The outcome of RNAi indicated that decreasing ezrin expression can notably inhibit the proliferation of the four hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines ( p < 0.01, n = 10). The proportion of cells in G2-M phase also decreased after RNAi. The number of pseudopods decreased as well after RNAi treatment ( p < 0.01, n = 5). The mobility and invasiveness of cancer cells decreased with decreasing ezrin expression tested by transwell assay ( p < 0.01, n = 8). Ezrin plays an important role in the process of hepatocellular carcinoma cell proliferation, migration, and invasiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]