Fig. 2

Dormant and reactivated dormant breast cancer colonies exhibit characteristics of an epithelial to mesenchymal transition. a Morphological changes from epithelial (left) to a spindle like (right) morphology were observed between growing MCF-7 colonies and reactivated dormant cells. Colonies were photographed at 40X magnification. b Western blots performed with lysates from MCF-7 cells incubated with or without FGF-2 in tissue culture for 6 days and dormant cells incubated with rhIL-6, IL-8 and TGFβ1 for an additional 6 days on fibronectin at clonogenic density. Blots were stained with antibodies to human E-cadherin, N-cadherin, SLUG, and ERα. Coomassie blue-stained gels were used as loading controls. Relative band intensity ratios to those of the corresponding loading control were determined