Fibronectin-mediated cell migration promotes glioma cell invasion through chemokinetic activity

In order to investigate the biological role of fibronectin in glioma cell invasion, we studied the relation between migratory responses or adhesiveness of glioma cells to fibronectin and the in vitro invasion in three human malignant glioma cell lines, A172, T98G and U373MG. All these cell lines chemotactically migrated in a dose-dependent manner to fibronectin in concentrations ranging from 0.5 to 10 µg/ml, with A172 cells showing the strongest migration and U373 cells the weakest. Checkerboard analyses demonstrated that A172 and T98G cells showed much stronger chemokinetic responses to fibronectin than U373MG cells. In contrast to the migratory responses, A172 and U373MG cells showed an almost equally high adhesion to fibronectin and T98G cells a low adhesion. The degree of expression of the integrin α5 subunit correlated well with the strength of glioma cell adhesion to fibronectin rather than that of migration to the molecule. Furthermore, the cell adhesion to fibronectin was almost completely inhibited by arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD)-containing peptides, but the fibronectin-stimulated cell migration was only partially inhibited. An in vitro invasion assay disclosed that U373MG cells invaded the artificial basement membrane barrier the most and A172 cells the least. However, addition of fibronectin to the glioma cells markedly enhanced the invasive activity of A172 and T98G cells but had little effect on that of U373MG cells. These results indicate that fibronectin-stimulated migration can be one of the factors promoting invasiveness of glioma cells and that the chemokinetic activity of fibronectin may play a crucial role in glioma invasion through conferring motor-driving force on the glioma cells.