Exfoliative toxin from Staphylococcus aureus was mitogenic for murine spleen cells. It was primarily active on T lymphocytes but also significantly stimulated B cells from the spleens of nude mice. The mitogenicity was not affected by simple sugar or alpha-methylpyranosides. N-acetylglucosamine and N-acetylgalactosamine inhibited its effect. Exfoliatin was as powerful a mitogen as the enterotox...

Pseudomonas exotoxin A, an ADP-ribosylating toxin produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, has been shown to stimulate the proliferation of murine thymocytes, which requires the participation of accessory cells. This requirement for accessory cells can be replaced by supernatant from adherent peritoneal exudate cells that have been stimulated with exotoxin A. Antibody to exotoxin A inhibits the indu...

CONTEXT Retrospective, observational studies have reported an association between diabetes treatment with insulin and a higher incidence of cancer. OBJECTIVE Overview the literature for in vitro and in vivo studies of the metabolic and mitogenic properties of basal insulin analogues and assess the implications for clinical use. METHODS Relevant studies were identified through PubMed and con...

We have previously reported that bradykinin (BK) represents an influential mitogenic agent in normal breast glandular tissue. We here investigated the mitogenic effects and the signalling pathways of BK in primary cultured human epithelial breast cells obtained from a tumour and from the histologically proven non-malignant tissue adjacent to the tumour. BK provoked cell proliferation, increase ...

Oncogenic Ras transforms immortal rodent cells to a tumorigenic state, in part, by constitutively transmitting mitogenic signals through the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade. In primary cells, Ras is initially mitogenic but eventually induces premature senescence involving the p53 and p16(INK4a) tumor suppressors. Constitutive activation of MEK (a component of the MAPK cascade) i...

Interactions between mycoplasmas and leukocytes are both specific and non-specific. Phagocytosis is generally resisted until the mycoplasma is opsonized by specific antibody. Lymphocytes react with mycoplasmas in a variety of ways; both stimulation and inhibition can occur as a result of antigenic (specific) or mitogenic (non-specific) properties of the organisms. A variety of mitogenic substan...

We previously showed that lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) and an adenylyl cyclase inhibitor (ACI) stimulate mitogenic activation of senescent human diploid fibroblasts. Because the modulation of cell proliferation may affect wound healing in aged organisms, we studied the effects of LPA and ACI on in vivo skin wound healing in aged Fisher 344 rats. We found that, in aged rats, wound healing improve...

Chemically defined serum-free media for rat hepatocytes have been useful in identifying EGFR ligands and HGF/MET signaling as direct mitogenic factors for rat hepatocytes. The absence of such media for mouse hepatocytes has prevented screening for discovery of such mitogens for mouse hepatocytes. We present results obtained by designing such a chemically defined medium for mouse hepatocytes and...

We have investigated the relationship between hydrolysis of phosphatidylcholine (PC) and activation of the Raf-1 protein kinase in Ras-mediated transduction of mitogenic signals. As previously reported, cotransfection of a PC-specific phospholipase C (PC-PLC) expression plasmid bypassed the block to cell proliferation resulting from expression of the dominant inhibitory mutant Ras N-17. In cont...

Fibroblast growth factor-1 (FGF-1) is a potent mitogen for mesodermand neuroectoderm-derived cell types in vitro. However, a mutant FGF-1 with deletion in its nuclear localization sequence (NLS, residues 21–27) is not mitogenic in vitro. We demonstrated that synthetic peptides containing this NLS were able to stimulate DNA synthesis in a FGF receptor-independent manner after they were delivered...