Morphological analysis of shape changes in human carcinoma cells in vitro

Abstract

Cell shape of various body tissues depends on cell functions and may serve as the morphological criterion for tissues classification. Cells change their shapes in response to internal and external factors in vivo and in vitro and it is the criterion of cells transformation in malignization. One of the widely used methods for detection of the cell transformation grade is an electronic microscopy. The apparent advantage of the method is that the morphological changes of the cell as well as the intracellular organelles can be analyzed on the ultrastructural level, which makes the analysis highly informative and reliable. However, the electronic microscopy method is very laborious, and thus for the analysis it is necessary to conduct pre-selectetion of cells. This study proposes a method of pre-morphological analysis of subpopulations of human carcinoma cells, which allows assessing the cell transformation degree compared to the normal cells