yeast-as-a-chassis-for-developing-functional-assays-to-study-human-p53

Yeast As a Chassis for Developing Functional Assays to Study Human P53

The finding that the well-known mammalian P53 protein can act as a transcription factor (TF) in the yeast S. cerevisiae has allowed for the development of ...

University of Trento

Reversine is a potent antitumor 2,6-diamino-substituted purine acting as an Aurora kinases inhibitor and interfering with cancer cell cycle progression. In this study we describe three reversine-related molecules, designed by docking calculation, that present structural modifications in the diamino units at positions 2 and 6. We investigated the conformations of the most stable prototropic tautomers of one of these molecules, the 6-cyclohexyl-6-methyl-2-phenyl-7-purine-2,6-diamine (), by Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculation in the gas phase, water and chloroform, the last solvent considered to give insights into the detection of broad signals in NMR analysis. In all cases the H(9) tautomer resulted more stable than the H(7) form, but the most stable conformations changed in different solvents. Molecules ⁻ were evaluated on MCF-7 breast and HCT116 colorectal cancer cell lines showing that, while being less cytotoxic than reversine, they still caused cell cycle arrest in G2/M phase and polyploidy. Unlike reversine, which produced a pronounced cell cycle arrest in G2/M phase in all the cell lines used, similar concentrations of ⁻ were effective only in cells where p53 was deleted or down-regulated. Therefore, our findings support a potential selective role of these structurally simplified, reversine-related molecules in p53-defective cancer cells.

Bartolomeo Bosco

Biography

JoVE Journal Publications

Other Publications