I developed imatinib-resistant cells after exposing K562 leukemic cells to a range of concentrations of imatinib for a specified time period. Now I want to store them at -80, so will their resistivity remain within those leukemic cells or not? And another question is, will the resistivity of imatinib-resistant cells remain as if they were grown in normal media (without imatinib) for 24-48 hours?
@Priyanka Singh, at -80, the metabolism of the cells are heavily suppressed and so the possibility of loosing resistance. To me, the cells will not loose resistance when grown in normal medium but to be on the safe side, you may want to add subtoxic concentration of imatinib to the medium.
Good luck.
Storage at -80 should not impact the resistance levels of these cells. The answer to your question about growing the cells in media without imatinib depends on two factors (1) the genetics of the resistance mechanism and (2) the fitness cost of being resistant to imatinib. If the resistance is a single gene dominant trait then resistance should be very stable. If it is recessive, you can expect susceptible individual cells to appear and if there is a fitness cost (slower cell cycle timing, reduced vigor etc.) the susceptible cells will start to dominate the culture. If the resistance is a multigene trait you could anticipate regression to susceptibility based on linkage, gene-gene interactions and again fitness costs. Nevertheless, I would expect that resistance would be stable when the cells are grown in imatinib free media over the short term - 100 cycles or so. It would be an interesting experiment to measure this regression to susceptibility (or stability of resistance) over time as this would have important clinical implications. Once resistance has been selected for there will be a residual frequency of resistance genes in the cell line so resistance will come back much more quickly than when it was first selected for - again depending on the fitness costs of resistance.
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