Paclitaxel (Taxol®) is a highly praised anticancer drug, known for its efficiency in treating different cancers. It belongs to a class of compounds called taxanes that are derived from the plants of the genus Taxus. This drug is now FDA approved, but there was a time when the name Taxol was less known to the scientific world. Taxol, being a unique molecule in its structure, properties and mecha...

The chemotherapeutic drug Taxol is known to interact within a specific site on beta-tubulin. Although the general location of the site has been defined by photoaffinity labeling and electron crystallography, the original data were insufficient to make an absolute determination of the bound conformation. We have now correlated the crystallographic density with analysis of Taxol conformations and...

The first successful effort to replicate the beginning of the Taxol oxidase phase in the laboratory is reported, culminating in the total synthesis of taxuyunnanine D, itself a natural product. Through a combination of computational modeling, reagent screening, and oxidation sequence analysis, the first three of eight C-H oxidations (at the allylic sites corresponding to C-5, C-10, and C-13) re...

Within a plant, there can exist an ecosystem of pathogens and endophytes, the latter described as bacterial and fungal inhabitants that thrive without causing disease to the host. Interactions between microbial inhabitants represent a novel area of study for natural products research. Here we analyzed the interactions between the fungal endophytes of Taxus (yew) trees. Fungal endophytes of Taxu...

Taxol chemotherapy is one of the few therapeutic options for men with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). However, the working mechanisms for Taxol are not fully understood. Here, we showed that treatment of 22Rv1, a PTENpositive CRPC cell line, with paclitaxel and its semisynthetic analogue docetaxel decreases expression of the androgen receptor (AR)–activated genes prostate-specific ...

Some cancer cells evade chemotherapy by expressing cell membrane pumps to expel toxins. One such pump is the P-glycoprotein, which exports the widely used chemotherapy compound Taxol as it passes through the membrane. To counter P-glycoprotein efflux, Elena Dubikovskaya et al. modified Taxol’s structure, attaching a peptide that alters the mechanism by which the compound enters cells. The new c...

Both cell culture and clinical studies show that the androgen receptor (AR) plays a key role in the growth and survival of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), a lethal form of the disease in the clinic, suggesting that AR remains to be a major target for the treatment of CRPC. Taxol chemotherapy is one of the few therapeutic options for patients with CRPC albeit the underlying mechanis...

Taxol chemotherapy is one of the few therapeutic options for men with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). However, the working mechanisms for Taxol are not fully understood. Here, we showed that treatment of 22Rv1, a PTEN-positive CRPC cell line, with paclitaxel and its semisynthetic analogue docetaxel decreases expression of the androgen receptor (AR)-activated genes prostate-specific...