Locomotion and proliferation of glioblastoma cells in vitro: statistical evaluation of videomicroscopic observations

Object. The motility and doubling of human glioblastoma cells were investig ated by means of statistical evaluation of large sets of data obtained usin g computer-aided videomicroscopy. Methods. Data were obtained on cells in four established glioblastoma cell lines and also on primary tumor cells cultured from fresh surgical samples. Growth rates and cell cycle times were measured in individual microscopic fields. The averages of cell cycle time and the duplication time for the re corded cell populations were 26.2 +/- 5.6 hours and 38 +/- 4 hours, respect ively. With these parameters, no significant differences among the cell lin es were revealed. Also, there was no correlation in the cell cycle time of a parent cell and its progeny in any of the cultures. Statistical analysis of cell locomotion revealed an exponential distributio n of cell velocities and strong fluctuations in individual cell velocities across rime. The average velocity values ranged from 4.2 to 27.9 mu m/hour. In spite of the uniform histopathological classification of the four tumor s, each cell line produced by these tumors displayed distinct velocity dist ribution profiles and characteristic average velocity values. A comparison of recently established primary cultures with cell lines that had propagate d multiple times indicated that cells derived from different tumors sustain their characteristic locomotor activity after several passages. Conclusions. It can be inferred from the data that statistical evaluation o f physical parameters of cell locomotion can provide additional tools for t umor diagnosis.