Purine Nucleotide Synthesis during Terminal Differentiation

Abstract

A number of human myeloid leukemia cell lines have been established which can not only be maintained as immature blast cells in continuous, self-renewing culture but also be induced to undergo maturation toward either the myeloid or monocytic phenotype¹⁾. Such cell lines have attracted considerable attention in these days because they provide experimentally accessible model systems with which to define basic mechanisms involved in the regulation of myeloid progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation. The HL60 cell line, originally isolated from a patient with acute promyelocytic leukemia, can be lead to myeloid morphological, functional, and biochemical changes have been observed during DMSO-induced differentiation²⁾. In differentiated HL60 cells, purine nucleotide synthesis decreases³⁾, but there have been some reports demonstrating a drastic change in purine nucleotides pool during differentiation^4–6). This seem to the presence of a complicated mechanism involved in differentiation. We used DMSO-treated HL60 cells to investigate the role of salvage and de novo pathway for intracellular purine nucleotide metabolism during proliferation and differentiation.