Thapsigargin-induced Sequential Expression of Proteins Related to Autophagy and Apdptosis in Human Breast Cancer MCF-7 Cells

摘要

Autophagy is characterized by massive degradation of cellular contents, intracellular membrane/vesicle reorganization and lysosomal activity. Autophagic cell death is another physiological phenomenon of programmed cell death, but its relevance to cancer remains a frustrating topic to discuss because it has been proposed to one of the survival mechanisms for cancer cells, but it could also play a role in the elimination of cancer cells via a caspaseindependent death. Apparently, autophagic cell death has been shown to trigger a nonapoptotic cell death program in cancer cells displaying functional defects of caspases, but interestingly, mechanism of autophagy to apoptosis switch triggered in cancer cells has been reported recently.