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Effects of Pituitary Adenylate Cyclase Activating Polypeptide on the Survival and Signal Transduction Pathways in Human Choriocarcinoma Cells

The pituitary adenylate cyclase activating polypeptide (PACAP) has several effects in endocrine and reproductive organs, including the placenta. PACAP is generally known as a survival‐promoting peptide acting on divergent signal transduction pathways. However, its effects on the survival and signaling mechanisms of trophoblast cells are not known. In the present study we found that 1‐h pretreatment with PACAP38 did not significantly influence the survival of JAR cytotrophoblast cells. However, the survival rate of cells exposed to oxidative stress or CoCl2‐induced in vitro hypoxia showed a significant further decrease in PACAP‐treated cells, implying that PACAP sensitizes the cells to these stressors. This was not observed in the case of lipopolysaccharide or ethanol treatment. Western blot data revealed that, in cells exposed to oxidative stress, PACAP treatment decreased phosphorylation of all extracellular signal‐regulated kinase (ERK), phospho‐jun N‐terminal kinase (JNK), protein kinase B, p38 mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK), and phospho‐glycogen synthase kinase (GSK) and the expression of bax. The overall effect seems to be a sensitizing effect in almost all examined pathways when oxidative stress was applied, which may explain the enhancing effect of PACAP on cell death in contrast to most other cell types examined so far. Our data show that the signaling mechanism of PACAP may be different in trophoblast cells to that observed in other cell lines.