Radiosensitizing Effect of TRPV1 Channel Inhibitors in Cancer Cells.

Radiosensitizers are used in cancer therapy to increase the γ-irradiation susceptibility of cancer cells, including radioresistant hypoxic cancer cells within solid tumors, so that radiotherapy can be applied at doses sufficiently low to minimize damage to adjacent normal tissues. Radiation-induced DNA damage is repaired by multiple repair systems, and therefore these systems are potential targets for radiosensitizers. We recently reported that the transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 (TRPV1) channel is involved in early responses to DNA damage after γ-irradiation of human lung adenocarcinoma A549 cells.

Sequence and intramolecular distance scoring analyses of microbial rhodopsins.

Recent accumulation of sequence and structural data, in conjunction with systematical classification into a set of families, has significantly advanced our understanding of diverse and specific protein functions. Analysis and interpretation of protein family data requires comprehensive sequence and structural alignments. Here, we present a simple scheme for analyzing a set of experimental structures of a given protein or family of proteins, using microbial rhodopsins as an example.

Purine receptor P2Y6 mediates cellular response to γ-ray-induced DNA damage.

We previously showed that nucleotide P2 receptor agonists such as ATP and UTP amplify γ-ray-induced focus formation of phosphorylated histone H2A variant H2AX (γH2AX), which is considered to be an indicator of DNA damage so far, by activating purine P2Y6 and P2Y12 receptors. Therefore, we hypothesized that these P2 receptors play a role in inducing the repair response to γ-ray-induced DNA damage. In the present study, we tested this idea by using human lung cancer A549 cells.