objective we have previously shown that rose bengal (rb) alone, not as a photosensitiser, could induce apoptotic- and non-apoptotic cell death in different melanoma cell lines. to clarify rb-induced toxicity mechanisms, role of caspases and reactive oxygen specious (ros) were studied in melanoma cells. material and methods human melanoma cell lines, me 4405 and sk-mel-28 were cultured in dmem m...

Reaction systems of boronic acid (RB(OH2), R = phenyl or 3-fluorophenyl) with diols and no proton ambiguity were elaborately set up, and kinetic measurements were conducted to elucidate the relative reactivities of RB(OH)2 and RB(OH)3(-). In the reactions of phenylboronic and 3-fluorophenylboronic acids with propylene glycol, the reactivity order was: RB(OH)2 >> RB(OH)3(-), whereas in the react...

The retinoblastoma (Rb) gene product is a prototypic tumor suppressor. Mice lacking the Rb gene are not viable and die in utero at approximately 13 days of gestation. In this study, we have rescued Rb-/- prostates by grafting pelvic organ rudiments from Rb-/- mouse embryos under the renal capsule of adult male nude mouse hosts. Grafts of embryonic pelvic organs developed into functional prostat...

BACKGROUND Inactivation of retinoblastoma (RB) tumor suppressor function occurs frequently in lung cancer. Short-hairpin RNA can be constructed to target specific sequences and efficiently knock down protein expression. We developed a short-hairpin RNA approach to specifically target Rb in lung cancer cells to determine the influence of RB knockdown on proliferation. METHODS NCI-H520 human lu...

The role of genomic imprinting in the development of tumors with defective retinoblastoma protein function remains debatable. Disruption of either parental allele of the murine retinoblastoma (Rb) gene is sufficient for spontaneous melanotroph carcinogenesis to occur in almost all Rb+/- mice. Nevertheless, mice with a disrupted paternal Rb allele succumb to tumors faster. In these animals, the ...

The retinoblastoma tumor suppressor (RB) is functionally inactivated in the majority of cancers and is a critical mediator of DNA damage checkpoints. Despite the critical importance of RB function in tumor suppression, the coordinate impact of RB loss on the response to environmental and therapeutic sources of damage has remained largely unexplored. Here, we utilized a conditional knockout syst...

Loss of function of the human retinoblastoma gene (Rb) is a frequent genetic abnormality in human malignancies and causes a disturbance in the cell cycle and loss of normal proliferation and differentiation. We studied the loss of heterozygosity (LOH) of the Rb gene in 31 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded cartilaginous tumors using polymerase chain reaction. The tumors were subdivided into 8 ca...

The ability to rescue viable prostate precursor tissue from retinoblastoma-deficient (Rb-/-) fetal mice has allowed for the isolation and characterization of the first Rb-/- prostate epithelial cell line. This cell line, designated Rb-/-PrE, was utilized for experiments examining the consequences of Rb loss on an epithelial population. These findings demonstrated that Rb deletion has no discern...

At temperatures below 2.1 K, long-lived gaseous Rb atoms in glass cells have been generated with a simple method: irradiating the cells, containing 4He gas and Rb metal, with a cw laser. The obtained atomic Rb density ( approximately 10(8) cm(-3)) decreases with a 1/e time constant of about 10 s at 1.85 K. We have performed optical pumping of the Rb atoms and measured the longitudinal electroni...