Overexpression of activated or dominant negative Rac1 alters cell morphology but not CTGF expression.

<p>(A) HKC-8 cells were transfected with dominant negative Rac1 (T17N) or constitutively active Rac1 (G12V) coupled to eGFP. 24 h after transfection, cells were stimulated with LPA (10 μM) for 1 h. F-actin fibers were visualized with PromoFluor phalloidin. Arrows indicate transfected cells. Scale bar: 20 μm. (B) HKC-8 cells were transfected with eGFP-coupled dominant negative (dn) or constitutively active (ca) Rac1, or eGFP (GFP) as control together with luciferase-coupled SRE constructs. Expression of cotransfected beta galactosidase was used as reference. Cells were stimulated with LPA (L, 10 μM) for 4 h. Data shown are means ± SD of 3–5 independent experiments performed with duplicate transfections. In each experiment the mean of the unstimulated control values was set to 1. (C) Cells were treated as in (B) but transfected with a 4.5 kb CTGF promoter construct. Data are means of 3 independent experiments with duplicate transfections. In each experiment the mean of the unstimulated control values was set to 1.