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. 2024 Mar;37(2):560-566.
doi: 10.1007/s13577-023-01011-4. Epub 2023 Dec 11.

Investigation of the mixed origins of the MGC-803 cell line reveals that it is a hybrid cell line derived from HeLa

Meimei Yang  1 , Jing He  1 , Sixuan Xia  1 , Yudong Wang  1 , Jun Xiong  1 , Cong Liao  1 , Nan Li  1 , Sanfu Qu  2   1 , Chao Shen  3   4
Affiliations

Investigation of the mixed origins of the MGC-803 cell line reveals that it is a hybrid cell line derived from HeLa

Meimei Yang et al. Hum Cell. 2024 Mar.

Erratum in

Abstract

Human cancer cell lines have an essential role in cancer research, but only authentic cell lines should be used as biological models. Authentication testing using short tandem repeat (STR) loci has shown that MGC-803 cells, which were reported to come from gastric adenocarcinoma, are similar to HeLa. In this study, we confirmed that the MGC-803 cell line contains genetic material from HeLa, including genetic sequence from human papilloma virus 18 (HPV18). Additional alleles were present on STR analysis that remained stable after extensive passaging and generation of mono-clones. This behavior is consistent with a hybrid cell line arising from cell-cell fusion. Further genetic analysis revealed that MGC-803 originated from donors with different genetic ancestries, one African (HeLa) and the other Asian. Transcriptomic analysis demonstrated that MGC-803 closely resembles HeLa and another nasopharyngeal-HeLa hybrid cell line CNE-2. Based on these findings, we conclude that MGC-803 is a hybrid cell line derived from HeLa and other cells, the latter derived from a different patient with Asian genetic ancestry.

Keywords: Authentication; Cell line; Cross-contamination; Misidentification.

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