Immortalised human cell lines

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the use of primary and established animal and human cell lines in which mycotoxin toxicity is determined on morphological criteria and end-points like protein or DNA synthesis. The development of immortalised human cell lines is now being actively pursued to serve as standardised bioassays for the detection of food toxins including mycotoxins (Lewis et al., 1998). 

While a number of immortalised cell lines emanating from different cell types of the airway (i.e., tracheo-bronchial) epithelium of lungs from various mammalian species are available (see Chap. 10), reliable and continuously growing cell lines that possess AEC morphology and phenotype are not reported to date. Most studies use cell lines of alveolar epithelial origin for drug absorption studies, while the observations are hard or meaningless to extend to in vivo human situation. 

Liver (human hepatoma cell line) Biliary tract (immortalised mouse cholangioc5hes)... 

Xanthine oxidoreductase is asymmetrically localised not only in the cytoplasm but also on the outer surface of human endothelial (umbilical vein endothelial cells and EA-hy-926 permanent endothelial cell line) and epithelial (HB4a, a mammary epithelial cell line conditionally immortalised by transfection with SV40 virus) cells in culture (Rouquette et al. 1998). 

Using primary passage-1 human tracheobronchial epithehal cell cultures and an immortalised human bronchial epithehal cell line, HBEl, Harper et al. (2001) observed that tumour necrosis factor-a enhanced nuclear factor-xB (NF-xB) transcriptional activity. TNF-a activation coincided with translocation of NF-xB p65 from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. Pre-treatment with N-acetylcysteine (1-10 mM) inhibited TNF-a-induced activation of NF-xB transcriptional activity and lL-8 promoter-mediated reporter gene expression. In contrast, elevated thioredoxin protein levels in cells enhanced TNF-a-dependent NF-xB transcriptional activity and IL-8 promoter activity. 

Human immortalised non-tumorigenic keratinocyte HaCaT cells (CeU Lines Service, Germany) were seeded mito the treated and untreated samples in the culture dishes and incubated at 37 °C for 4 days [10]. DMEM (high glucose) supplemented with 2mM L-glutamine solution and 10% fetal calf serum was used as the culmre medium. 

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