Comparison of Glutathione S-transferase-${\pi}$ Content in Drug-resistant and -sensitive Cancer Cells

Glutathione S-transferase (GST) is a multifunctional protein that catalyzes the catalyzes the conjugation of glutathione with electrophilic compounds. It exists in a variety of isoenzy-matic froms with a wide range of substrate specificity and plays a pivotal role in detoxification of various drugs. In order to elucidate the GST-${\pi}$'s involvement of multidrug resistance (MDR) in drug-resistant tumor cell lines, we determined GST-${\pi}$ content by "1 step sandwich method". Consequently, adriamycin resistant cells of MCF-7 (MCF-7/ADM) have 7-fold increase of GST-${\pi}$ content than that of MCF-7 cells, while its {TEX}$IC_{50}${/TEX} was 116-fold greater than parent cell line. By northrn blotting, we compared whether MCF-7/ADM cells express GST-${\pi}$ mRNA. The GST-${\pi}$ mRNA expression in these cells was not inducible, but constitutive when treated for 24 h with a concentration of 0, 20, 200, and 2000 nM of adriamycin, respectively. Taken together, these results suggest that GST-${\pi}$ may not be directly associated with multidrug resistance in these human cancer cell lines.ell lines.