Perturbation of lipid metabolism, especially of cholesterol homeostasis, can be catastrophic to mammalian brain, as it has the highest level of cholesterol in the body. This notion is best illustrated by the severe progressive neurodegeneration in Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) disease, one of the lysosomal storage diseases, caused by mutations in the NPC1 or NPC2 gene. In this study, we found that ...

Mutation of p53 is a rare event in multiple myeloma, but it is unknown if p53 signaling is functional in myeloma cells, and if targeted nongenotoxic activation of the p53 pathway is sufficient to kill tumor cells. Here, we demonstrate that treatment of primary tumor samples with a small-molecule inhibitor of the p53-murine double minute 2 (MDM2) interaction increases the level of p53 and induce...

BACKGROUND Tubular repair upon injury involves regeneration from either surviving tubular epithelial cells or from their surviving local progenitor cells; hence, compound screening with cell lines may be inadequate. Here, we demonstrate that the renal cell isolation procedure and subsequent outgrowth of tubular cells can mimic the renal injury phase and tubular cell regeneration from whichever ...

The tumor suppressor p53 plays a key role in regulation of the cell cycle, apoptosis and senescence in response to various stresses. We screened a library of 7920 chemical compounds for the p53 activator and identified N-[2-(dimethylamino)ethyl]-2,3-dimethyl-4-oxo-4H-pyrido[1,2-a]thieno[2,3-d]pyrimidine-9-carboxamide (PTP), which significantly increased p53-mediated reporter activity in colorec...

DNA strand breaks are a prerequisite for many cancer-associated genomic alterations, including amplifications, deletions, inversions, and structural rearrangements. High-throughput technologies that measure genome-wide DNA quantities, such as DNA sequencing and single nucleotide polymorphism or comparative genomic hybridization arrays, enable researchers to accurately detect such lesions. Recen...

Induction of p53 by DNA damage results in apoptosis of teratocarcinoma cells, whereas MDM2, encoded by a p53-responsive gene, can reverse this phenotype by inhibiting p53 function. Here we report that UV (10 or 20 J/m2), but not gamma irradiation (7 or 10 Gy), caused a massive apoptosis of human teratoma Tera-2 or murine testicular carcinoma F9 cells, both of which contain wild-type p53, but no...

Cellular pathways relay information through dynamic protein interactions. We have assessed the kinetic properties of the murine double minute protein (MDM2) and von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) ubiquitin ligases in living cells under physiological conditions that alter the stability of their respective p53 and hypoxia-inducible factor substrates. Photobleaching experiments reveal that MDM2 and VHL are h...

P53 is a key regulator of many cellular processes and is negatively regulated by the human homolog of murine double minute-2 (MDM2) E3 ubiquitin ligase. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of either gene alone, and in combination, are linked to cancer susceptibility, disease progression, and therapy response. We analyzed the interaction of TP53 R72P and MDM2 SNP309 SNPs in relationship to ou...

p53 phosphorylation and association with proteins is implicated in its stability and activity. We have compared the association of DNA-bound and overall pools of p53 with murine double minute 2 (Mdm2), c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK), p300/CBP, and p14 ARF during cell cycle progression. Whereas DNA-bound p53 associates with JNK at G0-G1 and with Mdm2 and p300 during S and G2-M phases, the gener...

BACKGROUND Induction of cellular senescence through activation of the p53 tumor suppressor protein is a new option for treating proliferative disorders. Nutlins prevent the ubiquitin ligase MDM2 (murine double minute 2), a negative p53 regulator, from interacting with p53. We hypothesized that cell senescence induced by Nutlin-3a exerted therapeutic effects in pulmonary hypertension (PH) by lim...