Analysis of the inhibitory mechanism of the rare sugar D-allose on MOLT-4F leukemia cell proliferation.

Abstract

D-Allose, the C-3 epimer of D-glucose, is one of the rare sugars which occurs rarely in nature. D-Allose was shown to have the most potent inhibitory effect among all rare hexoses on cell proliferation of various human cancer cells. In particular, various lymphoma cell lines have been elucidated to have different susceptibility to D-allose. In other words, the proliferation of some human leukemia cell lines was significantly inhibited by D-allose, and some were not. We chose 5 leukemia cell lines, and found that MOLT-4F has the highest susceptibility to D-allose. Then, we investigated the effect of D-allose on MOLT-4F and Daudi cells which possess the highest and lowest sensitivity to D-allose, respectively. We examined three points: (i) alteration of the D-glucose uptake by D-allose; (ii) incorporation of D-allose into cells; (iii) protein or gene expression altered by D-allose. We found that D-glucose utilization was significantly inhibited by D-allose. However the addition of excess amount of D-glucose in the medium could not abolish the inhibition. These results were suggested the important role of this protein in the effect of D-allose. We found that TXNIP gene expression and its protein expression were specifically and markedly enhanced in MOLT-4F cells by D-allose. This may explain the susceptibility of MOLF-4F cells to D-allose. [J Physiol Sci. 2008;58 Suppl:S201]