Multimicroscopic study of curcumin effect on fixed nonmalignant and cancerous mammalian epithelial cells
Résumé
The morphology changes, in particular the organization of microtubules in mammalian nonmalignant HMEC 184A1 and cancerous MCF-7 cells during curcumin treat- ment have been investigated by utilizing multiphoton, fluorescence, and atomic force (AFM) microscopies. Fluorescence microscopy reveals formation of ring-like structures of microtubules circumscribing the nuclear area in HMEC 184A1 cells after treatment, while in MCF-7 cells, no important changes were observed. Topo- graphy analyses of fixed HMEC 184A1 and MCF-7 be- fore and after treatment with curcumin were performed using AFM and the effect of the employed cells' fixation method was investigated on MCF-7 cells. Due to its in- depth optical sectioning capacity multiphoton microscopy provided valuable complementary information on curcu- min's effect on both cells' types. Combining information provided by AFM and optical fluorescence and biphoton microscopes allows us to gain a better understanding of the cells and their curcumin-induced changes, especially for microtubules which are the main target of antitumor chemotherapy treatments. Our multimicroscopic study demonstrates that 6 h incubation with curcumin does not induce significant modifications in the interphase micro- tubules in the malignant MCF7cell, whereas it has meas- urable effects on those of the nonmalignant HMEC 184A1 cells, revealing also morphology modifications over the nuclear area of these cells.