Injury of endothelial cells has been postulated to be an initial trigger of the progression of atherosclerosis in patients with diabetes. Previously, we demonstrated high D-glucose induced endothelial apoptosis through the bax-caspase pathway and the potential contribution of hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) to the pathogenesis of endothelial dysfunction. In this study, we analyzed the molecular ...

The recent finding that the Retinoblastoma protein (Rb) is able to regulate apoptosis in a non-transcriptional manner directly at the mitochondria by interaction with the pro-apoptotic protein Bax prompted this investigation of the complex formed between Rb and Bax. Because the function of Rb in the cellular processes of proliferation, apoptosis, senescence and differentiation is regulated by p...

Many biologic markers are associated with poor prognosis in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), but their mechanistic role remains unclear. Bax is an essential proapoptotic protein and decreased levels in malignant cells lead to resistance to apoptosis. Using a Bax degradation activity (BDA) assay, CLL cells were found to show variable Bax instability. However, BDA did not correlate with Bax pr...

The proapoptotic protein BAX contains a single predicted transmembrane domain at its COOH terminus. In unstimulated cells, BAX is located in the cytosol and in peripheral association with intracellular membranes including mitochondria, but inserts into mitochondrial membranes after a death signal. This failure to insert into mitochondrial membrane in the absence of a death signal correlates wit...

OBJECTIVE Deregulated apoptosis might be involved in some of the features of Fanconi anaemia (FA). The possibility that the pro-apoptotic Bax protein could be involved in an increased susceptibility to apoptosis in FA patients was investigated. MATERIALS AND METHODS Intracellular Bax expression, Bcl-2 expression (an anti-apoptotic protein) and cell death were analysed in 26 FA peripheral bloo...

Bax is a protein that promotes apoptosis (a form of cell death). The atomistic details of the mechanism by which Bax is activated during apoptosis remain a subject of debate. C-terminal basic residues in the sequence of Bax show remarkable conservation across a variety of species. The role of these charged residues in the stability of Bax was investigated by submitting substituted mutants to mo...

The patterns of expression of the bcl-2, bax, and bci-X genes were examined immunohistochemically in neurons of the adult rat brain before and after 10 min of global ischemia induced by transient cardiac arrest. High levels of the cell death promoting protein Bax and concomitant low levels of the apoptosis-blocking protein Bcl-2 were found in some populations of neurons that are particularly se...

Sulforaphane, a constituent of many edible cruciferous vegetables, including broccoli, effectively suppresses proliferation of cancer cells in culture and in vivo by causing apoptosis induction, but the sequence of events leading to cell death is poorly defined. Here, we show that multidomain proapoptotic Bcl-2 family members Bax and Bak play a critical role in apoptosis induction by sulforapha...

To further investigate the molecular basis underlying the dysregulation of B cell homeostasis associated with bovine leukemia virus disease progression in cattle, bovine bax was cDNA cloned and sequenced. The predicted amino acid sequence of bovine Bax revealed a 192-amino-acid protein having extensive identity with the human (97%), murine (93%), and rat (94%) homologues. Because the ratio of B...