HepG3 cell line origin - (Oct/08/2012 )

Hi everybody, my question seems to be quite simple, but still. Does anybody know the exact origin of HepG3 cell line and its difference from HepG2 cells?

Thank you in advance!
Dinar

see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3418247/

Thank you very much for the reply! But what confused me in this article before, was this sentence: "HepG3, a HepG2-derived stable cell line containing an integrated wild-type DHBV head-to-tail unit-length genomic DNA dimer (unpublished data)". It looks like they integrated this DNA into HepG2 and called it HepG3 since then because of "unpublished data" they mention, at least for me it sounds like that. Do you agree? I saw papers mentioning HepG2 and HepG3 (and even some HepG4) cell lines in 1991 http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/1828229. They say, all these three were purchased at ATCC, but ATCC has probably changed a lot since those times, because it doesn't offer you HepG3 or HepG4 any longer.

Other authors refer to an even older paper http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/2838902, that I cannot reach online. Finally, several other HepG3 users send you back to 1983 and paper http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/6308320 that seems to have nothing to do with HepG3...

Ahhh, the paper trail - get used to frustrations like that in science, it is surprisingly common.

Basically the HepG2 line was transformed by integration of viral genes into the genome, which produced HepG3 to distinguish it from the original line