Background Breast cancer has become an important disease that threatens the life and health of women all over the world because of its increasing incidence and mortality，and the main factor that affects its prognosis is invasion and metastasis. Platelet membrane glycoprotein Ib alpha (GPIbα) is a key adhesion factor expressed on platelet membrane, we further studied the effect of ectopic expression of GPIbα on invasion and metastasis of breast cancer in human breast cancer cell line. Objective To study the effects of transfection of GPIb alpha on invasion and metastasis in breast cancer cells. Methods Transient cell transfection was used to study the ectopic expression of GPIbα in MDA-MB-231cells and T47D cells. Tranfection efficiency was confirmed by measuring the expression of GPIbα using western blotting assay and real-time fluorescence quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis. Results Our results showed that MDA-MB-231 GPIbα stable low expression cell line and T47D GPIbα stable high expression cell line was successfully constructed. The expression of GPIbα in T47D stable high expression group was about 4.75 times that of the control group, and the expression of GPIbα in MDA-MB-231 stable low expression group was about 2.08 times that of the control group. Overexpression for GPIbα in T47D cells promoted the migration and invasion ability of breast cancer cells in vitro, while SiRNA transfection for GPIbα in MDA-MB-231cells possessed the opposite inhibitory effect. Conclusion We conclude that elevating the ectopic expression of GPIbα could promote the invasion and metastasis of breast cancer cells.

Breast Cancer, GPIbα, Transfection, Metastasis