Non-mitotic proliferation of malignant cancer cells revealed through live-cell imaging of primary and cell-line cultures.

Introduction: Anti-mitosis has been a key strategy of anti-cancer therapies, targeting at a fundamental property of cancer cells, their non-controllable proliferation due to overactive mitotic divisions. For improved anti-cancer therapies, it is important to find out whether cancer cells can proliferate independent of mitosis and become resistant to anti-mitotic agents.

Results: In this study, live-cell imaging was applied to both primary-cultures of tumor cells, and immortalized cancer cell lines, to detect aberrant proliferations.

Intrinsic and chemically-induced daughter number variations in cancer cell lines.

Multipolar mitosis was observed in cancer cells under mechanical stress or drug treatment. However, a comprehensive understanding of its basic properties and significance to cancer cell biology is lacking. In the present study, live-cell imaging was employed to investigate the division and nucleation patterns in four different cell lines.