BACKGROUND Cancer biomarkers are sought to support cancer diagnosis, predict cancer patient response to treatment and survival. Identifying reliable biomarkers for predicting cancer treatment response needs understanding of all aspects of cancer cell death and survival. Galectin-3 and Beclin1 are involved in two coordinated pathways of programmed cell death, apoptosis and autophagy and are link...

PURPOSE We aimed to investigate the expression of EGFR and the autophagy-related markers Beclin1 and LC3 in cervical cancer. METHODS Beclin1, LC3, and EGFR expression were analyzed in 80 samples of cervical squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), 40 samples of high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), and 40 samples of normal cervical tissues by immunohistochemistry. The protein expression ...

Vitamin D3 causes potent suppression of various cancer cells; however, significant supraphysiological concentrations of this compound are required for antineoplastic effects. Current combinatorial therapies with vitamin D3 are restricted to differentiation effects. It remains uncertain if autophagy is involved in vitamin D3 inhibition on leukemia cells. Here we show that besides triggering diff...

Maslinic acid (2α, 3β-dihydroxyolean-12-en-28-oic acid, MA) was isolated from natural plants and showed anti-cancer activity in rat Pheochromocytoma PC12 cells in our previous studies. We now discover that MA disrupts the interaction between Bcl2 and autophagy scaffold protein Beclin1 in the above cell line, leading to the up-regulation of autophagy. We investigated the effect of MA on the inte...

Radiotherapy alone has several limitations for treating lung cancer. Inhalation, a non-invasive approach for direct delivery of therapeutic agents to the lung, may help to enhance the therapeutic efficacy of radiation. Up-regulating beclin1, known as a tumor suppressor gene that plays a major role in autophagy, may sensitize tumors and lead to tumor regression in lungs of K-ras(LA1) lung cancer...

Although more than 20 putative members have been assigned to the nucleotide-binding and oligomerization domain-like receptor (NLR) family, their physiological and biological roles, with the exception of the inflammasome, are not fully understood. In this article, we show that NLR members, such as NLRC4, NLRP3, NLRP4, and NLRP10 interact with Beclin1, an important regulator of autophagy, through...

Impairment of autophagy has been associated with liver injury. TLR4-stimulation by LPS upregulates autophagy in hepatocytes, although the signaling pathways involved remain elusive. The objective of this study was to determine the signaling pathway leading to LPS-stimulated autophagy in hepatocytes. Cell lysates from livers of wild type (WT; C57BL/6) mice given LPS (5 mg/kg-IP) and hepatocytes ...

All gammaherpesviruses express homologues of antiapoptotic B-cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) to counter the clearance of infected cells by host antiviral defense machineries. To gain insights into the action mechanisms of these viral BCL-2 proteins, we carried out structural and biochemical analyses on the interactions of M11, a viral BCL-2 of murine gamma-herpesvirus 68, with a fragment of proautophag...

Diabetic cardiomyopathy is associated with suppression of cardiac autophagy, and activation of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) restores cardiac autophagy and prevents cardiomyopathy in diabetic mice, albeit by an unknown mechanism. We hypothesized that AMPK-induced autophagy ameliorates diabetic cardiomyopathy by inhibiting cardiomyocyte apoptosis and examined the effects of AMPK on the int...

The decision of stem cells to proliferate and differentiate is finely controlled. The Caenorhabditis elegans germline provides a tractable system for studying the mechanisms that control stem cell proliferation and homeostasis [1-4]. Autophagy is a conserved cellular recycling process crucial for cellular homeostasis in many different contexts [5], but its function in germline stem cell prolife...