Differential regulation of survivin by p53 contributes to cell cycle dependent apoptosis.

Recent studies indicate that cell-cycle checkpoints are tightly correlated with the regulation of apoptosis, in which p53 plays an important role. Our present works show that the expression of E6/E7 oncogenes of human papillomavirus in HeLa cells is inhibited in the presence of anti-tumor reagent tripchlorolide (TC), which results in the up-regulation of p53 in HeLa cells. Interestingly, under the same TC-treatment, the cells at the early S-phase are more susceptible to apoptosis than those at the middle S-phase although p53 protein is stabilized to the same level in both situations. Significant difference is exhibited between the two specified expression profiles. Further analysis demonstrates that anti-apoptotic gene survivin is up-regulated by p53 in the TC-treated middle-S cells, whereas it is down-regulated by p53 in the TC-treated early-S cells. Taken together, the present study indicates that the differential p53-regulated expression of survivin at different stages of the cell cycle results in different cellular outputs under the same apoptosis-inducer.