Butyrate augments interferon-α-induced S phase accumulation and persistent tyrosine phosphorylation of cdc2 in K562 cells

Interferon-α (IFN-α) is a clinically useful cytokine for treatment of a variety of cancers, including chronic myelocytic leukaemia (CML). Most CML cells are sensitive to IFN-α; however, its biological effects on leukaemic cells are incompletely characterized. Here, we provide evidence that IFN-α induces a significant increase in the S phase population in human CML leukaemic cell line, K562, and that the S phase accumulation was augmented by sodium butyrate. In contrast, neither sodium butyrate alone, nor sodium butyrate plus IFN-γ, affected the cell cycle in K562 cells. These data suggest that the effect of sodium butyrate depended upon IFN-α-mediated signalling. The ability of leukaemic cells to exhibit the S phase accumulation after stimulation by IFN-α plus sodium butyrate correlated well with persistent tyrosine phosphorylation of cdc2, whereas treatment with IFN-γ plus sodium butyrate did not affect its phosphorylation levels. Considering that dephosphorylation of cdc2 leads to entry to the M phase, the persistent tyrosine phosphorylation of cdc2 may be associated with the S phase accumulation induced by IFN-α and sodium butyrate. In addition, another human CML leukaemic cell line, MEG-01, also showed the S phase accumulation after stimulation with IFN-α plus sodium butyrate. Taken together, our studies reveal a novel effect of sodium butyrate on the S phase accumulation and suggest its clinical application for a combination therapy with IFN-α, leading to a great improvement of clinical effects of IFN-α against CML cells. © 1999 Cancer Research Campaig

“In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing Transnational Child Trafficking in Contemporary Crime Fiction.

This chapter investigates representations of transnational child trafficking in contemporary crime fiction, focusing specifically on the depiction of child trafficking and its victims. Beyer examines the role of crime fiction in raising reader awareness of human trafficking and of the child victims’ predicament and plight, considering didactic dimensions of the genre and how it tends to erase victims in the aftermath of crime. Through detailed examinations of representations of child trafficking and its social and cultural contexts in selected post-2000 British and Scandinavian crime fiction texts, the chapter argues that crime fiction can be seen to engage explicitly in public and private debates around human trafficking, and, through its popular outreach, has the potential to affect popular perceptions of human trafficking and its victims

Heroines of gendercide: The religious sensemaking of rape and abduction in Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean migrant communities

This study seeks to understand a diaspora community narrative of rape and abduction suffered during the genocidal massacre of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath. Based on interviews with 50 Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean migrants in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, whose families are from the village of Bote, known as one of the ‘killing fields’ in southeast Turkey, the article explores the ways in which descendants remember the ‘forgotten genocide’ of Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean communities in 1915. The research reveals that the descendants of survivors make sense of the sexual violence experienced in Bote mainly through a religious narrative and that, for them, the genocide is, in spite of all the sufferings the males had to go through, a feminized event. In their gendercide narrative, the abducted and raped women are identified as the ‘heroines’ of the genocide