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Carcinogenesis Advance Access originally published online on January 20, 2005
Carcinogenesis 2005 26(4):713-723; doi:10.1093/carcin/bgi025
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Carcinogenesis vol.26 no.4 © Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved.

ARTICLE

Human colon cancer cells lacking Bax resist curcumin-induced apoptosis and Bax requirement is dispensable with ectopic expression of Smac or downregulation of Bcl-XL

Ramachandran Rashmi, Santhosh Kumar and Devarajan Karunagaran*

Cancer Biology Laboratory, Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala 695 014, India

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +91 471 2347975; Fax: +91 471 2348096; E-mail: dkarunagaran{at}hotmail.com

Multiple apoptotic stimuli induce conformational changes in Bax, a proapoptotic protein from the Bcl-2 family and its deficiency is a frequent cause of chemoresistance in colon adenocarcinomas. Curcumin, a dietary compound from turmeric, is known to induce apoptosis in a variety of cancer cells. To understand the role of Bax in curcumin-induced apoptosis we used HCT116 human colon cancer cells with one allele of Bax gene (Bax+/–) and Bax knockout HCT116 (Bax–/–) cells in which Bax gene is inactivated by homologous recombination. Cell viability decreased in a concentration-dependent manner in Bax+/– cells treated with curcumin (0–50 µM) whereas only minimal changes in viability were observed in Bax–/– cells upon curcumin treatment. In Bax–/– cells curcumin-induced activation of caspases 9 and 3 was blocked and that of caspase 8 remained unaltered. Curcumin-induced release of cytochrome c, Second mitochondria derived activator of caspase (Smac) and apoptosis inducing factor (AIF) was also blocked in Bax–/– cells and reintroduction of Bax, downregulation of the antiapoptotic protein Bcl-XL by antisense DNA as well as the overexpression of Smac, highly sensitized the Bax–/– cells toward curcumin-induced apoptosis. There was no considerable difference in the percentage of apoptotic cells in Bak RNAi transfected Bax+/– or Bax–/– cells treated with curcumin when compared with their corresponding vector transfected cells treated with curcumin. The present study demonstrates the role of Bax but not Bak as a critical regulator of curcumin-induced apoptosis and implies the potential of targeting antiapoptotic proteins like Bcl-XL or overexpression of proapoptotic proteins like Smac as interventional approaches to deal with Bax-deficient chemoresistant cancers for curcumin-based therapy.


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