Our investigation brought up several interesting issues. First, the expression of GRP78 at both levels of the mRNA and protein was decreased significantly under the inhibition of BAPTA-AM in the NCI-H460 cell line, and the reduction of GRP78 showed a BAPTA-AM-dependent manner (Fig.
1). Secondly, the percentage of VP-16 induced cell apoptosis in the cells pretreated with BAPTA-AM was significantly higher than that in the cells pretreated with A23187 or control cells (Fig.
4). To our best knowledge, this is the first report on the down-regulation of GRP78 by BAPTA-AM, including the function of the suppression in the resistance to VP-16 in SCLC NCI-H446 cells.
GRP78 are Ca
2+-binding proteins in the ER, the intracellular Ca
2+ levels have been implicated as potent regulators in the expression of the GRP78. Cytoplasmic free Ca
2+ is maintained at about 10-7 M by concerting actions of Ca
2+ pumps on ER, mitochondria and plasma membranes [
18,
19]. Thus, it is a common practice to employ specific calcium ionophore or Ca
2+ pump inhibitor to evaluate the expression of GRP78 [
20]. We previously reported that a calcium ionophore, A23187, a highly potent ER stress inducer, could induce the expression of GRP78 genes and proteins in human lung cancer cell line [
16]. The possible mechanism for GRP78 induction under A23187 is that it lowers the ER calcium level by releasing calcium stores, which affects protein secretion and causes accumulation of protein in the ER [
21,
22]. Unlike A23187, BAPTA-AM, the membrane-permeant Ca
2+ chelator, is a derivative of EGTA that specifically binds Ca
2+; when modified by an acetoxymethylester group (AM) it is rendered lipophilic and thus able to cross the plasma membrane as well as intracellular membranes, including that of the ER. Once inside the cell, cellular esterases cleave the AM group, whereby the molecule is able to bind Ca
2+ and is no longer membrane permeant [
23]. In this work, we found that BAPTA-AM attenuated the expression of GRP78 significantly. In line with our results, Juliann and Whei-meih [
24,
20] also respectively reported that BAPTA-AM caused a down-regulation of GRP78 in human breast cancer cell line and 9L rat brain tumor cells. However, the mechanism of BAPTA-AM caused GRP78 reduction is still not clear. Reduction of the intracellular calcium level maybe one of the possible mechanisms [
23].
The apoptotic results from the cells pretreated with BAPTA-AM or A23187, prior to the addition of VP-16, showed that, the apoptotic rate of cells with lower level of GRP78 in the BAPTA-AM→A23187-treated group increase significantly as compared to A23187-treated group and control with high or normal level of GRP78, indicating that the down-regulation of GRP78 by BAPTA-AM may increase the sensitivity to VP-16 in NCI-H446 cell. Analysis of the cell cycle distributions showed that there was a great decrease in G
1 phase and a dramatic increase in S phase for BAPTA-AM→A23187-treated group cells, suggesting that BAPTA-AM may render more sensitivity to VP-16 through the change of distribution of cell cycle in NCI-H446 cell. Nowadays, only few reports are involved on BAPTA-AM associated chemotherapy resistance. The mechanism for the chemotherapy resistance to VP-16 is complex, multiple pathways are involved. Topoisomerase IIα is an ATP-dependent nuclear enzyme that plays important roles in DNA replication and chromosome segregation by its ability to change the topological structure of DNA. VP-16 is the topoisomerase inhibitors, it can interact with the enzyme to stabilize topoisomerase-DNA complex, blocking strand-passing activity, thereby resulting in DNA breakage [
25]. Furthermore, it had been proposed that the chaperone function of GRP78 could affect growth factor processing, creating a cell proliferation block to escape drug killing that only occurs in cycling cells [
26]. Since VP-16 targets S phase cells [
27] and here we confirmed that the inhibition of BAPTA-AM dramatically increased the percentage of S phase cells, we proposed that GRP78 might render the cells sensitive to VP-16-induced apoptosis through altering the cell cycle distribution in NCI-H446 cell line. Therefore, GRP78 suppression may become a new focal point for the cancer therapy.