www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/ Oncotarget, Vol. 6, No. 17 Elevated MARCKS phosphorylation contributes to unresponsiveness of breast cancer to paclitaxel treatment Ching-Hsien Chen1, Chun-Ting Cheng2,3, Yuan Yuan4, Jing Zhai5, Muhammad Arif1, Lon Wolf R. Fong1, Reen Wu1 and David K. Ann2,3 1 Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Center for Comparative Respiratory Biology and Medicine, University of California Davis, California, USA 2 Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope, Duarte, California, USA 3 Irell and Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences, Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope, Duarte, California, USA 4 Department of Medical Oncology and Experimental Therapeutics, City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, Duarte, California, USA 5 Department of Pathology, City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, Duarte, California, USA Correspondence to: David K. Ann, email:
[email protected] Correspondence to: Reen Wu, email:
[email protected] Keywords: phospho-MARCKS, MANS peptide, paclitaxel, mitotic inhibitor, breast cancer Received: December 23, 2014 Accepted: March 26, 2015 Published: April 14, 2015 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT Accumulating evidence has suggested that myristoylated alanine-rich C-kinase substrate (MARCKS) is critical for regulating multiple pathophysiological processes. However, the molecular mechanism underlying increased phosphorylation of MARCKS at Ser159/163 (phospho-MARCKS) and its functional consequence in neoplastic disease remain to be established. Herein, we investigated how phospho-MARCKS is regulated in breast carcinoma, and its role in the context of chemotherapy.