A lineage of self-renewing cell types expressing a range of markers of forebrain lineage. In this context, it was interesting to find in our study that tumorspheres from primary tumors and allograft tumors express distinct markers, but both show tumorigenecity. The success of culturing long-term tumorspheres from primary NB tumors may open new avenues to identify novel stem cell markers for diagnostic and therapeutic NB. We found that FBS is essential for the formation and indefinite passaging of tumorspheres. In the case of embryonic stem cells, they differentiate into neurons if FBS is removed from the medium. In our case, the decreased concentration of FBS facilitated the outgrowth of Cryptochlorogenic-acid neurites of primary tumor spheres, supporting the idea that FBS strongly inhibits neural differentiation of these cells. Our results suggest that FBS helps to keep NB cells undifferentiated. In addition, we found that bmercaptoethanol was critical for tumorsphere formation. If bmercaptoethanol was removed after several passages, the tumorspheres were no longer passaged. This suggests that b-mercaptoethanol 
is also essential for indefinite passaging. The mechanisms underlying b-mercaptoethanol’s functions remain to be verified. PrimNeus supported the sphere formation from primary tumors and bone marrow in a neuroblastoma model. In contrast, it did not support the sphere formation from normal bone marrow cells. Therefore, PrimNeus may provide an appropriate Glycitin culture condition for a subset of tumor cells in neuroblastoma, but may not be generally applicable to stem cells such as normal bone marrow stem cells. This suggests that an appropriate culture condition may depend on cell types. Indeed, hematopoietic stem cells or progenitor cells require several growth factors, such as insulin, IL-3, IL-6, G-CSF and GM-CSF, but these are dispensable for the culture of tumor initiating cells. Squamous cell carcinoma is the second most common type of lung cancer accounting for about 30% of all lung cancers. When diagnosed early, lung SCC is well curable by surgical excision. However, most of LSCC patients encounter high rate of recurrence for metastasis and resistance to existing chemotherapeutic agents after resection. Therefore, in order to reduce mortality of LSCC, it is necessary to identify molecular markers for early diagnosis and elucidate the biochemical mechanism governing the processes of recurrence and metastasis as well as therapeutic resistance. A proteomic approach using fluorescent dye-labeled proteins coupled with two-dimensional gel electrophoresis and mass spectrometric analysis has been widely applied to identify differentially expressed proteins between normal and tumor specimens. These differentially expressed proteins could either serve as molecular markers for diagnosis or lead to understanding the molecular mechanisms of metastasis and therapeutic resistance. By employing the 2-DIGE and MS approaches, we compared the protein profiles between clinical metastatic, non-metastastic LSCC tissues and adjacent normal lung tissues, and identified a number of differentially expressed proteins participating in many biological functions such as cell signaling regulation, carbohydrate metabolism, molecular chaperones, and protein synthesis. Among these protein candidates, we were particularly interested in fructose-bisphosphate aldolase A, an key enzyme in glycolysis responsible for catalyzing the reversible conversion of fructose-1,6-bisphosphate to glyceraldehydes-3-phosphate and dihydroxyacetone phosphate. ALDOA is one of the three aldolase isozymes, encoded by three different genes. These aldolases are differentially expressed during development. ALDOA is highly expressed in the developing embryo and in adult muscle.