CacyBP/SIP phosphatase activity in neuroblastoma NB2a and colon cancer HCT116 cells

Recently, we have reported that CacyBP/SIP could be a novel phosphatase for ERK1/2 kinase. In this work, we analyzed the CacyBP/SIP phosphatase activity toward ERK1/2 in 2 cell lines of different origin. We showed that overexpression of CacyBP/SIP in NB2a cells resulted in a lower level of phosphorylated ERK1/2 (P-ERK1/2) in the nuclear fraction while such overexpression in HCT116 cells had no effect on the level of P-ERK1/2. Moreover, we found that overexpression of CacyBP/SIP resulted in higher phosphatase activity in the nuclear fraction obtained from NB2a cells when compared with HCT116 cells. Using 2-D electrophoresis we showed that the pattern of spots representing CacyBP/SIP differed in these 2 cell lines and was probably due to a different phosphorylation state of this protein. We also established that after overexpression of CacyBP/SIP in NB2a cells, the amount of nuclear β-catenin was low, while it remained high in HCT116 cells. Since NB2a cells have differentiation potential and HCT116 cells do not, our data suggest that different activity of CacyBP/SIP in these 2 cell lines might affect the ERK1/2 pathway in the differentiation or proliferation processes.