BACKGROUND Apoptosis repressor with caspase recruitment domain (ARC) is abundantly expressed in cardiomyocytes. Protein kinase CK2 can phosphorylate ARC at threonine-149, thereby enabling ARC to antagonize apoptosis. ARC phosphorylation occurs in a constitutive manner. Nevertheless, cardiomyocytes still undergo apoptosis that is related to cardiac diseases such as myocardial infarction and hear...

BACKGROUND Linkage of the 11-amino-acid transduction domain of HIV TAT to a heterologous protein allows the protein to be transduced readily into cells. METHODS AND RESULTS In this study, we inserted the apoptosis repressor with caspase recruitment domain (ARC) or beta-galactosidase (beta-gal) cDNA into the pTAT-hemagglutinin bacterial expression vector to produce genetic in-frame TAT-ARC or ...

PURPOSE The purine antimetabolite, 6-thioguanine (6-TG), is an effective drug in the management of acute leukemias. In this study, we analyze the mechanisms of apoptosis associated with 6-TG treatment and casein kinase 2 (CK2 or CKII) in human tumor cells. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Small interfering RNA and chemical CK2 inhibitors were used to reduce CK2 activity. Control and CK2 activity-reduced c...

Type 2 diabetes involves insulin resistance and β-cell failure leading to inadequate insulin secretion. An important component of β-cell failure is cell loss by apoptosis. Apoptosis repressor with caspase recruitment domain (ARC) is an inhibitor of apoptosis that is expressed in cardiac and skeletal myocytes and neurons. ARC possesses the unusual property of antagonizing both the extrinsic (dea...

The development of cancer resistance to chemotherapy is the major obstacle to cancer therapy. Here, we identified that the phosphorylation of apoptosis repressor with caspase recruitment domain (ARC) at threonine 149 was essential to inhibit doxorubicin (DOX) induced apoptosis and mitochondrial fission in cancer cells. Our further study showed that casein kinase II (CK2) inhibitors could decrea...