Effect of curcumin treatment on protein phosphorylation in K562 cells

Deregulation of signaling pathways is a common feature observed in human cancers and other diseases. Therefore, there is a strong need for compounds that are able to modulate or inactivate upregulated signaling events. Natural compounds extracted from plants have long been used and still present a dynamic domain in the research of new therapeutic tools. Among those molecules, curcumin was already described for its antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, and antiseptic properties. Many actions of curcumin target proteins and kinases implicated in the signaling pathways. However, the effects described depend on the treatment conditions used, as well as the cell line studied, and these features vary strongly from one study to the other. During this work, we evaluated the effect of one curcumin treatment (20 muM, 48 h) on the phosphorylation of a number of proteins and kinases in the human chronic myelogenous leukemia cell line K562. These results allow to compare the results obtained in one condition on various proteins.