Effects of gossypol on the cell cycle phases in T-47D human breast cancer cells.

Since gossypol, a naturally occurring component of cottonseed oil, exhibits a broad spectrum of activities, we have examined it as an antitumor agent on breast cancer. The effects of different concentrations of gossypol on the T-47D human breast cancer cell cycle phases were studied using cytometric image processing on Feulgen stained nuclei. The proportion of cells at different cell cycle phases was determined by discriminate analysis of the image parameters and gave good classification ranging from 86 to 100%. Gossypol was found to increase the G0/G1 fraction of the T-47D cells. This cell kinetic alteration by gossypol was shown to be dose dependent and reversible. Complete reversal of the effect of gossypol was observed after four days with a simple change to gossypol-free medium. The cells then progressed into S and G2/M phase, thus indicating that gossypol-treated cells remain viable. Gossypol was shown to have a strong inhibitory effect on cellular proliferation in T-47D cells. It was also found that this agent is only toxic to cells at the highest dose tested (10 microM). The results of this study may be of clinical significance in the treatment of breast cancer, since gossypol shows strong antiproliferative properties.

Chromatin texture changes related to proliferation and maturation in erythrocytes.

Erythroid cell types were quantitatively assessed on the basis of the analysis of their nuclear images after Feulgen and Heidenhain blue counterstaining. An original nonsupervised classification method, developed in our laboratory, was applied to cell cycle analysis. Results obtained suggest that, in the four proliferative generation cycles, which concur with the successive morphological stages, there is a sequential flow of cells from one morphological stage to the next by cell cycling. We show that the chromatin pattern alone made it possible to set up a metric of the whole differentiation process occurring in the normal human erythroblastic lineage in which proliferating events occur.

A texture analysis model for the classification of video images of B and T cells and the formation of subcategories.

B and T lymphocytes of known origin were used to test a pretopologic (mathematical) classification model that uses chromatin texture as a parameter. One data base was obtained by digitizing the cells with a standard TV camera coupled with a microscope, with the images transmitted to an image-analysis system (ASTI) coupled with a multi-20 computer. A second data base was obtained from the same slides using the TAS coupled with a PDP 11/34. The data bases were analyzed by the pretopologic program, which paramatizes the dispersion and aggregation of 15 possible optical densities (O.D.) and their relation to each other for each cell. Sub-categories were formed according to an algorithm that forms categories of images having the same pretopologic predominating sequences of O.D. values. In the ASTI system, 92% of the B-cell and 94% of the T-cell training samples were classified unambiguously; the test sample was classified as 60% B cells and 40% T cells, which is in close agreement with the spleen distribution as noted in the immunologic literature. The classification algorithm found 13 B-cell subcategories and 12 T-cell subcategories in the respective training sample; classification of the spleen test sample added no new subcategories. The TAS results were in agreement with the ASTI results within the limits of a restricted sample size. The overall B-cell and T-cell classification results were in agreement with those obtained by other authors . The subcategories found are unlikely to be fortuitous since only certain combinations of predominating O.D. values occurred and a large number of digitized nuclei had identical parameters. Nevertheless, the biologic significance of the subcategories cannot be assessed by mathematical methods alone, and these methods must be tested with appropriate biologic models.