| Summary: | Autophagy is a conserved catabolic process, which functions in maintenance of cellular homeostasis in eukaryotic cells. The self-eating process engulfs cellular long-lived proteins and organelles with double-membrane vesicles, and forms a so-called autophagosome. Degradation of contents via fusion with lysosome provides recycled building blocks for synthesis of new molecules during stress, e.g. starvation. Peiminine is a steroidal alkaloid extracted from Fritillaria thunbergii which is widely used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Previously, peiminine has been identified to induce autophagy in human colorectal carcinoma cells. In this study, we further investigated whether peiminine could induce autophagic cell death via activating autophagy-related signaling pathway AMPK-mTOR-ULK by promoting SQSTM1(P62). Xenograft tumor growth in vivo suggested that both peiminine and starvation inhibit the growth of tumor size and weight, which was prominently enhanced when peiminine and starvation combined. The therapeutical effect of peiminine in cancer treatment is to be expected.
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